


The Souls of Men

by nagapdragon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-17 19:40:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 40,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagapdragon/pseuds/nagapdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam hates that moment in an exorcism, right after the demon leaves, when the daemon explodes into a puff of gold and they know they’ve failed one more person.</p>
<p>Every time they finish a job where someone doesn’t make it, Aurora curls around Machaera in a silent reminder that far too soon, they’ll have to watch Machaera turn to a pile of gold dust, too.</p>
<p>Starting in Season 3 and moving on through the timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to start as a series of vignettes because I don't feel like writing every single point, but eventually will become a cohesive story.

Sam hates that moment in an exorcism, right after the demon leaves, when the daemon explodes into a puff of gold and they know they’ve failed one more person.

Every time they finish a job where someone doesn’t make it, Aurora curls around Machaera in a silent reminder that far too soon, they’ll have to watch Machaera turn to a pile of gold dust, too.

 

***

 

_Broward County, Florida_

 

_“Heat of the moment,”_ the radio croons. Sam wakes slowly, sitting up with the weight of Aurora sprawled across his legs. She yawns, taking a lazy leap over to Dean’s abandoned bed so Sam can get up. Even the crappy motels they stay at have a variety of daemon beds, but Aurora’s pickier than Machaera about where she sleeps. Arctic wolf, all that white fur? Aurora has all the vanity he can’t afford the time for.

_“Telling you what your heart is,”_ it continues, and Sam focuses on Dean and Machaera. Dean’s tying his shoes, Machaera batting idly at his untied shoelaces, grinning wildly. He likes the weird cases, the ones where they don’t quite know what’s going on before they get to town. Sam likes a little more stability.

“Rise and shine, Sammy!” 

Machaera rumbles a purr in agreement, bowling Dean over to lick at Aurora’s snout and nip at her ears, back on the other side of the room before Aurora has time to react. 

“Dude. Asia?”

“Come on. You love this song and you know it.”

“Yeah, and if I ever hear it again, I’m going to kill myself.”

Dean grins, turning up the volume, and continues on with the rest of his morning routine, Machaera trailing barely a step behind him. Aurora and Sam exchange a _look_ , the one that means Dean’s eerily chipper thing he’s been doing since making his deal and it’s kind of freaking them both out. 

When they get to the diner, Machaera crawls under the table and up to sprawl across both window seats. She always picks her spot. Neither of them can really argue with a 300 lb golden tiger, after all. They slide in next to her, letting Machaera drop her head on to Dean’s lap and lash her tail against Sam before Aurora lays across their feet. 

“Hey, Tuesday. Pig n’ a poke.”

“You even know what that is?”

Their waitress, name tag reading Doris and a squirrel perched in the pocket of her apron, taps her pen against her pad. “You boys ready?”

Dean gives her his winningest smile. “Yes. I’ll have the special, side of bacon, and a coffee.” Sam raises an eyebrow. Dean’ll need two sides of bacon if he wants to eat any of it. Machaera has the same tastes as he does and Dean’s a sucker for giving her bacon even though she doesn’t need it. 

“Make it two coffees and a short stack.”

“You got it.” She retreats, and nobody else is paying any sort of attention to them. Dean finishes his own sweep, double-checking everything behind Sam while pretending to admire the decor. 

“I’m telling you, Sam, this job is small fry. We should be spending our time hunting down Bela.”

“Okay, sure, let’s get right on that. Where is she again?”

“Shut up.” Machaera rumbles in agreement, but her tail doesn’t even twitch. All bluster and no force behind it, also known as Dean’s normal MO.

“Look. Believe me, I want to find her as bad as you do. In the meantime, we have this.” Sam retrieves the papers he gathered on their disappearance here, spreading them in front of Dean.

“All right, so this professor.”

“Dexter Hasselback was passing through town last week when he vanished.”

“Last known location?”

“His daughter says he was on his way to visit the Broward County Mystery Spot.” Hence, why they’re here instead of waiting for a pattern of unusual deaths or anything. Mystery Spot, unusual disappearance, probably up their alley.

“Where the laws of physics have no meaning.”

Sam shrugs as their waitress returns with their coffees. As she hands them their coffee, her bottle of hot sauce falls off the tray, smashing inches from Aurora’s nose. Sam flinches with her at the assault on their senses. 

“Whoops. Crap! Sorry.” She shouts for cleanup from the back and Aurora shuffles underneath Machaera, tucking her nose into the tiger’s white underbelly to try and avoid the hot sauce.

“Today,” Sam coughs, “is starting out fantastically.”

Dean shrugs, not as affected by the hot sauce as Aurora was, and eats his breakfast. 

That night, they sneak in to the Mystery Spot, and Sam doesn’t even see Machaera turn to dust as he cradles Dean in his arms, knowing in his heart that it is a fatal wound.

_“Heat of the moment,”_ the alarm clock croons, and Aurora jumps bolt upright, hackles raised, as the song continues. _“Telling you what your heart is.”_

“Rise and shine, Sammy!”

The _fuck_.

“Dude. Asia.” Dean grins, and Machaera rubs her head against his knee, purring.

“Dean.”

“Oh, come on, you love this song and you know it.” Dean jams along, ruffling Machaera’s fur. Sam looks at Aurora, confused, and decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

A car slams into Dean, the driver unapologetic, and Machaera puffs into gold dust. 

_“Heat of the moment,”_ the radio croons.

A rope snaps and a desk falls, crushing Dean and Machaera both.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Dean chokes on a piece of sausage.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Dean slips in the shower.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

“Do these tacos taste funny to you?”

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Electrocuted by his electric razor.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Wrestling an axe away from Sam in the Mystery Spot.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Doris the waitress, at the archery range.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Interfering with Cal robbing Tony the mechanic.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

Fell through a window after seeing Judge Myers in a furry bunny outfit which Sam _wishes_ he could scrub from his own memory.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

This is starting to feel ridiculously like a game of Clue. In the Mystery Spot, tripped and got caught in the fire Sam set. Car crash trying to leave town. Shelves collapsed in Home Depot. Alligator attack. Bleach and ammonia. And almost everything that’s happened to Dean has also happened separately to Machaera, taking Dean with her.

Sam’s never going to enjoy _Groundhog Day_ again.

Dean gets the missing poster from the blond girl, which is new, and promptly gets himself mauled by a dog.

_“Heat of the moment.”_

“For fuck’s sake,” he tells Aurora while Dean is in the shower. She whines and noses under his chin, forgoing speech this time because really, what can be said that they haven’t already discussed?

They go to the diner, because he’s done this enough and Dean gets whiny every time he wants to do something else today and after all these Tuesdays, he’s damn sick of listening to Dean complain about breakfast when he’s going to feed half of it to Machaera anyways, despite the fact that she doesn’t need to eat at all. 

Sam is on his laptop because he’s tried everything on the menu and the diner wasn’t that great to begin with. Dean, as always, is having his pig in a poke and feeding his bacon to Machaera. 

“So the police report says Dexter Hasselback is a professor, but that’s not all he is.”

“What is he?” Dean pauses with a piece of bacon almost to his mouth. Machaera wraps a paw around his wrist, dragging it down to her.

“I talked to his daughter. Guy’s quite the journalist. Columns in magazines, a blog. He writes about tourist attractions. Mystery spots, UFO crash sites- he gets his kicks debunking them. I mean, he’s already put four of these places out of business. Here.” He turns his laptop, and the one thing he does have to give to the time loop is that it’s been pretty great for research, once he stopped freaking out about Dean’s constant deaths.

“Dexter Hasselback, truth warrior? More like a pompous schmuck, you ask me.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I mean, I’ve read everything the guy’s ever written, and he must have weighed a ton, he was so full of himself.”

“When’d you have time to do all this research?”

In between your deaths, Dean, for the last who-know-how-many days. “Come on,” he says instead, because he’s tired of explaining that, too.

Dean laughs as Sam packs up his laptop, and he frowns. “What?”

“I just, it’s just funny, you know. I mean, this guy spends his whole life crapping on Mystery Spots and then he vanishes into one. It’s kinda poetic, you know? Just desserts.”

“You’re right, that is just desserts.” Sam glances across the diner, old habit despite the fact that nothing ever changes, finally focusing on the boring guy who reads the paper and eats pancakes every day’s plate and his strawberry syrup.

Strawberry syrup. 

Sam frowns and Aurora bristles.

“What’s wrong?” Dean steps closer and Machaera brushes up against Aurora, almost knocking her over.

“Guy has maple syrup for the last hundred Tuesdays, all of a sudden he’s having strawberry?”

“It’s a free country. Man can’t choose his own syrup, huh? What have we become?”

“Not in this diner. Not today. Nothing in this place ever changes. Ever. Except me.”

Fucking _shit_. 

_“Heat of the moment.”_

“So you think you’re caught in some kind of what, again?”

Sam suppresses a sigh. Dean never feels this _slow_ to him, but he’s never had to try and explain something to him this many times and never have him remember it before.

“Eat your breakfast,” he snaps, and Machaera’s tail lashes in irritation.

The man, and Sam really hopes he’s wrong because if he isn’t this will be so awkward, leaves and he follows, Dean trailing along behind him completely confused.

They wind through town before Sam finds the right moment, slamming the man into the fence and leveling the stake at his throat, and apparently it didn’t work before but maybe now he gets the element of surprise.

“I know who you are. Or should I say, what.” At his side, Aurora growls, cornering the man’s terrier. Machaera, confused but trusting of Sam’s judgement, prowls over to help ensure that the terrier has no way of getting in the way of whatever they’re doing. 

“Oh my god, please don’t kill me,” he begs, and Sam tightens his grip. 

“Uh, Sam?” Dean questions, but Machaera is unwavering.

“It took me a hell of a long time, but I got it,” he growls, and it would be almost funny if he hadn’t watched his brother die for every single one of those days it took him.

“What?”

“It’s your MO that gave you away. Going after pompous jerks, giving them their just desserts- your kind loves that, don’t they?” Dean makes a confused sound, not quite getting it because Sam hasn’t bothered really explaining this Tuesday.

“Yeah, sure, okay. Just put the stake down!”

“Sam, maybe you should,” Dean begins, and Aurora shoulders Machaera to get her to shut up.

“No! There’s only one creature powerful enough to do what you’re doing. Making reality out of nothing, sticking people in time loops- in fact you’d pretty much have to be a god. You’d have to be a Trickster.”

“Mister, my name is Ed Coleman, my wife’s name is Amelia, I got two kids, for crying out loud I sell ad space!”

“Don’t lie to me!” Sam is at the end of his rope. “I know what you are! We’ve killed one of your kind before!”

Beneath his hands, the Trickster morphs in to a far more familiar shape, and _fuck he hates Tuesdays_. 

“Actually, bucko, you didn’t.”

Dean groans and the Trickster’s daemon shifts, mirroring Machaera’s form except in a nearly stripeless white, forcing Aurora and Machaera to take a few steps back. She seems content to not attack, almost purring with contentment, and Aurora and Machaera exchange confused glances.

They argue, and the entire time Sam’s thinking that the Trickster seems a little too happy to be there with a stake pressed to his throat and that he’s getting the short end of the deal somehow, but he is right. If it isn’t Wednesday tomorrow, he will find him again, and this time he’ll make him suffer.

_“Promise me I’ll be back in time,”_ the radio sings, and the clock says Wednesday.

And he’s going to get them the hell out of Dodge before the Trickster changes his mind and throws him back in to that time loop. 

“Sweet, sweet Wednesday,” he tells Aurora.

“Wednesday is beautiful,” she agrees. 

Wednesday, as it turns out, is awful. It begins with a gunshot and ends when he’s exhausted, and this time, Wednesday is followed by Thursday.

Wednesday to Thursday, Thursday to Friday, and when Friday is actually followed by Saturday and he can’t find the Trickster anywhere he finally goes to Bobby to break the bad news. 

And then he hunts.

He hunts for six long months and he’s incredibly successful at it, but every kill is empty without Dean at his side to celebrate the end of a danger or saving at least a single life and he always ends up back on the same track finding out how to hunt the Trickster, and then he’s going to waste him.

Slowly.

When he stakes Bobby, there’s a moment where he thinks he’s wrong, that this isn’t too convenient, that it isn’t the Trickster. 

“Bobby? Bobby! Bobby!”

His corpse vanishes and Sam reaches for the stake. It shoots over his shoulder into the Trickster’s hands, and Sam turns to face him. 

“You’re right. I was just screwing with you. Pretty good, though, Sam. Smart. Let me tell you, whoever said Dean was the dysfunctional one has never seen you with a sharp object in your hands. Holy Full Metal Jacket.” The Trickster grins, but it’s a fleeting thing, his daemon flicking between forms restlessly at his feet. 

“Bring him back.” Aurora growls her accompaniment. 

“Who, Dean? Didn’t my girl send you flowers? Dean’s dead. He ain’t coming back. His soul’s downstairs doing the hellfire rumba as we speak.”

“Just take us back to that Tuesday- er, Wednesday- when it all started. Please. We won’t come after you, I swear.” Not like it would do them much good if they did. The Trickster’s more powerful than they ever thought. He knows that now.

“You swear.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Even if I could…”

“You can.” If he can’t nobody can.

“True. But that don’t mean I should. Sam, there’s a lesson here that I’ve been trying to drill into that freakish Cro-Magnon skull of yours.” This is about as serious as Sam’s ever seen the Trickster, ever even seen reports of him.

“Lesson? What lesson?”

“This obsession to save Dean? The way you two keep sacrificing yourselves for each other? Nothing good comes out of it. Just blood and pain. Dean’s your weakness. And the bad gus know it, too. It’s gonna be the death of you, Sam. Sometimes you just gotta let people go.”

“He’s my brother.” Saving him is non-negotiable. Not after all Dean’s done for him, all Dean’s willing to do in the future should it become necessary.

“Yup. And, like it or not, this is what life’s gonna be like without him.”

“Please. Just… please.”

The Trickster sighs, and his daemon turns into something mundane and boring. Sam doesn’t spare the attention for what. Aurora has her eye on it, and that’s enough. “I swear, it’s like talking to a brick wall. Okay, look. This all stopped being fun months ago. You’re Travis Bickle in a skirt, pal. I’m over it.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that’s for me to know and you to find out.” The Trickster smirks, raising his hand, and snaps.

_“Promise me I’ll be back in time.”_

“What, you gonna sleep all day?”

Dean.

Aurora leaps off his bed, tackling Machaera.

“I know, no Asia. This station sucks.”

“It’s Wednesday,” Sam breathes.

“Yeah, usually comes after Tuesday. Turn that thing off.”

Sam gets up, tightening his arms around Dean into a bone-crushing hug. Dean’s still going to Hell, he’ll still have to watch his brother bleed out at the paws and claws of the hellhounds and Machaera poof into dust, but for now, he has Dean.

And he wouldn’t trade that for the world.

 

 


	2. Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are

 

_New Harmony, Indiana_

 

“And remember what I taught you.”

Dean tears up and Sam is already crying as the clock strikes midnight, the first chime ringing out into the night, into what should be silence but is instead filled with the sobs of the Fremonts and their own terrified breaths. Machaera licks Aurora, then retreats to Dean’s side as he smiles weakly.

“I’m sorry, Dean. I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy.” Ruby looks genuinely contrite, the mute cat of her broken vessel’s daemon standing precisely half their range away from her. 

Dean’s head snaps to the side, face falling, and Machaera’s fur stands on end, growling into the nothingness.

“Hellhound,” he points out, as if nobody else had guessed what he was seeing.

“Where?”

“There.”

Ruby’s face falls. Aurora gets between Sam and the spot where everyone is staring doing what she can. Dean bolts and they all follow, keeping between the hellhound and Machaera’s tail and slamming the doors behind them. 

They dust the window and the doors, but even goofer dust won’t keep the hellhound out forever and they all know it. Dean pets Machaera, resigned, and Aurora presses against him directly.

The entire argument he has with Ruby passes in a moment, a whirlwind of Ruby-not-Ruby and the knife and the resounding stink of failure as Dean keeps his hand on Machaera, more needily holding on to his daemon than any time in Sam’s memory.

And then Lilith opens the door to the hellhound and there’s a mere moment before Dean is screaming and Machaera is too, screaming in her speaking tone and in the pained screeches of a cat. Red stains them both, marking the tears in Dean’s clothing and the deeper tears in his flesh and the ripped chunks that dye all of Machaera’s fur, covering the white and the gold and restriping her with both Dean’s blood and the golden ichor of her own. 

And Dean screams one more time, cutting off in a gurgle, and Machaera turns to dust.

Aurora howls her mourning and Sam screams himself raw, but it doesn’t fill the void in his life.

Nothing ever will.

 

_Pontiac, Illinois_

 

Ruby answers the door, and Sam’s willing to leave it at that- proving that he trusts her after trying to kill her four months ago and all that- until he hears Bobby.

Standing outside are not just Bobby and Vigilia, the Irish wolfhound daemon on high alert the same way she is any time she and Bobby venture out of their territory, but what looks like Dean and Machaera. And that isn’t possible. He held Dean’s cooling body in his arms, watched Machaera puff into dust while Lilith kept him pinned and unable to help his brother, and he realized that by far the kinder thing would have been to put a bullet between Dean’s eyes the minute the clock struck midnight because nothing could be worse than watching hellhounds tear into his brother. If he couldn’t have done it himself, Aurora could have torn Machaera’s throat out, or he could have put the bullet in Machaera’s skull instead, any of a thousand things better than what the hellhounds did. 

“Heya, Sammy,” Dean says quietly, the corner of his mouth quirking up. 

Dean steps into the room, ignoring Ruby, who looks just a shocked as Sam does. 

Not Dean. Dean’s _dead_. 

Sam draws his knife and lunges because whatever would come to him wearing Dean’s face, it isn’t good. Ruby screams- _bull-fucking-shit_ Ruby- and not-Dean blocks his attack before Bobby grabs him, dragging him off by the shoulders. Sam struggles, wondering if they got to Bobby too, and he’s already killed Bobby once, he doesn’t want to do it again.

“Who are you?” he shouts, making his struggles weaker and weaker in hopes that Bobby will ease up a little. 

“Like you didn’t do this?” Dean argues, Machaera prowling at his heels but clearly wanting to go to Aurora, who is having none of it. At all. 

“Do what?”

“It’s him,” Bobby tells him in his firm Dad-voice that’s a little more caring than what Dad actually used, more family and less soldier. “It’s him. I’ve been through this already, it’s really him.”

Sam sags in Bobby’s arms, reaching for Aurora as she rolls over, presenting her belly to Vigilia. 

“What?”

Dean steps up slowly, Machaera on his heels, heading for Sam. “I know,” he quips. “I look fantastic, huh?”

Sam tears up and Bobby finally lets him go. He lunges for Dean, this time without the knife, and pulls Dean to him with all intents of never letting go again. Aurora lets Machaera curl around her, Vigilia licking them both. 

 

***

 

“That’s a hell of an art project you’ve got going there.”

Bobby does’t bother looking over at him, just continues working steadily. The sooner they finish this, the better. In the center of a protective circle, Machaera is curled up into as tight of a ball as she can be, Vigilia trying to curl around her back like she used to when Machaera was a kitten. Vigilia treated Machaera and Aurora like her own, giving them all the affection Bobby couldn’t give Sam and Dean for fear of offending John enough that he wouldn’t bring them back.

It doesn’t work quite as well, not with Machaera having grown so much over the years. Still, it seems to set Vigilia to ease. As much as she can be at ease when they’re setting up every protective spell they know against this Castiel.

“Traps and talismans from every faith on the globe. How you doin?”

“Stakes, iron, silver, salt, knife. I mean, we’re pretty much set to catch and kill anything I’ve ever heard of.”

“This is still a bad idea,” Bobby warns. Again. 

“Yeah, Bobby, I heard you the first ten times. What do you say we ring the dinner bell?”

Bobby nods reluctantly, double-checking the sigils around their daemons. He goes to the other desk in the room, the one covered with Bobby’s spell work instead of Dean’s weaponry, and sprinkles some powder into a bowl. It begins to smoke as he chants in Latin, and Dean lets his hands re-familiarize himself with the positions of each of his weapons on the table and the others in his harness. 

And nothing happens. 

They wait and wait, and nothing. Machaera grooms her paws, cleaning her claws. 

“You sure you did the ritual right?”

Bobby gives him _the look_ and Vigilia nips at Machaera’s scruff. Dean feels it like a pinch on his own neck and he rubs it self-consciously. 

“Sorry. Touchy, touchy, huh?”

The roof begins to rattle and they both tense up. Inside their circle, Machaera and Vigilia jump to their feet, pacing tight circles and avoiding each other as not to knock them out of the circle.

“Wishful thinking, but maybe it’s just the wind.”

Bobby doesn’t even have to level him with _the look_ this time. Vigilia just nips at Machaera, giving him his silent warning. The door bursts open, and a man with a golden retriever daemon stalks in. Above their heads, the lightbulbs shatter into sparks and none of their sigils seem to do anything. 

They open fire, and even that doesn’t stop him. Dean grabs for the knife, because this asshole has to be a demon. Daemon looks a little too lively for a demonic possession, but they’ve learned to stop expecting all their patterns to remain the same.

“Who are you?”

Castiel tips his head to the side. “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition.”

“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Without pause, Dean buries the knife in Castiel’s chest. Castiel glances at it, bored, and reaches back to grab Bobby’s weapon before he can get a good strike in. Castiel touches Bobby’s forehead and he collapses, Vigilia falling over in synchonization. Machaera checks on her, nosing at Vigilia’s vitals. 

“Out cold,” she calls, rumbling a growl to warn off the other daemon from where she stands over Vigilia’s prone form. She snaps at the dog and it jumps back out of the way, shifting into some kind of bird and soaring to circle over them.

“We need to talk, Dean. Alone.”

An adult shapeshifting daemon, can’t be stopped nor killed, even by the demon knife?

Fucking Tricksters.

Dean crouches over Bobby, ignoring Castiel or whatever the hell it is. If it’s a Trickster, it’ll do whatever it feels like no matter what he does, so he might as well check on Bobby. And glare. It doesn’t do anything, but does it ever make him feel better.

“Your friend’s alive.”

“Who are you?” he snaps, because last time they saw one of these sonuvabitches, it killed him in increasingly horrible ways every day to torment Sam for months. That’s enough to make anyone angry and he’s just fresh out of hell, so he’s got plenty of angry.

“Castiel.”

“Yeah, I figured that much, I mean _what_ are you?” Trust monsters to play it coy with words.

“I’m an Angel of the Lord.”

Yeah, and he’s the King of La-La Land. “Get the hell out of here. There’s no such thing.” Castiel’s daemon swoops back to the ground, shifting into something four-legged that he isn’t taking his eyes off Castiel for long enough to identify. 

“This is your problem, Dean,” Castiel lectures, disappointed. “You have no faith.”

Lightning flashes, because they don’t ever get the non-dramatic monsters who can just say their piece without flashing lights and billowing smoke and _fucking lightning_ , and from behind Castiel the shadow of enormous wings is traced out on the back wall, stretching and shifting as he inspects Dean. 

The mark on his shoulder, the handprint that this Trickster… angel… _thing_ claims to have put there while ‘raising him from Perdition’- pompous much?- aches and he resists the urge to press on it like a fresh bruise. 

For now. 

 

 


	3. What You See Is What You Get Part One

 

_Wellington, Ohio_

 

“What are you watching?”

Dean doesn’t even bother looking away from the TV. He’s in his monkey suit, so Machaera is lying next to him rather than as close as she can get to half-draped over him without completely crushing him. White fur is murder on black suits, and her golden-orange fur is even worse.

“Hospital show. _Dr. Sexy, MD._ I think it’s based on a book.”

“When did you hit menopause?”

“It’s called channel surfing,” Machaera replies with all the dry sarcasm they can manage, and Dean turns the TV off while Sam gets his suit jacket. Aurora lies by the door, guarding it. 

“You ready?”

“Are you?” Sam challenges. 

Machaera nabs Dean’s keys, tossing them straight in the air for him to snatch before following him out. She’s livelier than ever, as opposed to the sluggishness that Sam’s consumption of demon blood imposed on Aurora. Dean opens the backseat of the Impala for Machaera to sprawl across the bench, leaving just enough room for Aurora to sit next to her and stick her head out the window. 

They get stares at the police station. They always do. Sure, most policemen have daemons that work alongside them and assume that FBI agents must have even more frightening ones, but Aurora and Machaera aren’t exactly your common cats and dogs. 

Aurora’s an Arctic wolf, fur always shining white because Sam will always take the time to groom her at the expense of himself. Machaera’s a golden tiger, a rare color of Bengal, as if having a three hundred pound tiger following Dean around wasn’t enough to draw eyes. 

“One more time,” the officer asks, eyes continually drawn away from their bland suits to Aurora and Machaera, “the FBI is here why, exactly?”

“Might have something to do with one of your locals getting his head ripped off,” Dean quips, flattening a hand at his side for Machaera to bump her nose against, steadying her so she stops pacing tight circles and freaking out the locals. 

“Bill Randolph died from a bear attack.” The officer tries, his German Shepard sitting at attention with his ears pricked. 

“How sure are you that it was a bear?” Aurora mirrors the officer’s daemon, sitting by Sam’s side while he talks, ignoring Machaera and staring down the dog. 

“What else would it be?” 

“Well, whatever it was, it chased Mr. Randolph through the woods, smashed through his front door, followed him up the stairs, and killed him in his bedroom.” Machaera takes a step forwards, moving his hand further back on her head, and joins Aurora in the staring contest. The other daemon doesn’t know which one of them to look at. “Is that common, a bear doing all that?”

“Depends how pissed off it is, I guess. Look, the Randolphs live way up in high country. You got trout runs to make a grown man weep. And bears.”

Deflection. The German Shepard glances away and Machaera gives it a toothy grin. 

“Right.” Sam says, bringing the attention back to him. “Now, what about Mrs. Randolph? The file says she saw the whole thing.”

“Yes, she did. My heart goes out to that poor woman.”

“She said bear.” Dean’s voice is flat and he’s back to subtly restraining Machaera. She’s got his temper, and that wouldn’t go well. The local officers accept daemon tussles as a matter of life, but they don’t appreciate a massive tiger attacking their little poodle. 

“Kathy Randolph went through a hell of a trauma. She’s confused.”

“What did she say?” Sam asks, and the officer’s daemon ducks its head and whines uncomfortably. 

“No,” Kathy Randolph argues when they get to interview her, “it must have been a bear. I mean, what else could it have been?”

Her chipmunk skitters off the table and on to her shoulder, nestling as close to the junction of neck and shoulder as she can.

“Mrs. Randolph,” Sam asks because Dean is apparently not calm enough for the task, “what do you think it was?”

“No, I, I remember clearly now. It was definitely a bear.”

“We’re sure it was,” Dean reassures, Machaera finally laying at his feet with her feet tucked underneath her. “But see, it helps us to hear every angle. So just tell us what you thought you saw.”

“It’s impossible, but… I could have sworn I saw… the Incredible Hulk.” She rushes the last words, flushing red. 

“The Incredible Hulk,” Sam verifies, and Machaera swipes at him with her tail in a warning to shut up.

“I told you it was crazy.”

“Bana or Norton?” Dean asks, amused by everything.

“Oh, no, those movies were terrible. The TV Hulk.”

“Lou Ferrigno.”

“Yes.”

“Spiky-hair Lou Ferrigno.”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” Dean exchanges a look with Sam, trying hard not to grin. 

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No. Uh, no, it’s just… is there, uh, would there be any reason that Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk, would have a grudge against your husband?”

“No.”

“No,” Dean repeats, and that’s that.

 

***

 

“Hey,” Sam greets when he returns to their motel room hours later.

“Find anything?” He hasn’t had much luck with the Internet and Machaera’s help has been to groom herself and leave fur all over his bed. 

“Well, uh, I saw the house.”

“And?”

“And there is a giant eight-foot-wide hole where the front door used to be. Almost like, uh…”

“A Hulk-sized hole,” Machaera finishes for him, more pleased by the development than either one of them. Dean gives her a betrayed look, his own words stolen by the other piece of his soul.

“Maybe. What do you got?”

“Well, it turns out that Bill Randolph had quite the temper. He’s got two counts of spousal battery, bar brawls, and court-ordered anger management sessions. You might say you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.”

“So a hothead getting killed by TV’s greatest hothead. Kinda sounds like just desserts, doesn’t it?”

Dean and Machaera laugh, and then she starts cleaning her claws.

“It’s all starting to make sense.”

“How is it starting to make sense?”

“Well, I found something else at the crime scene.” Sam pulls out a handful of candy wrappers, sprinkling them across the bed. Machaera, offended, swipes them off. 

“Candy wrappers,” Aurora offers, just in case they hadn’t noticed.

“Lots of them,” Sam confirms.

“Just desserts, sweet tooth, screwing with people before you kill ‘em? We’re dealing with the Trickster, aren’t we?” Machaera growls to punctuate his words. 

“Sure looks like it.”

“Good. I’ve wanted to gank that mother since the Mystery Spot.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” 

“No, I mean are you sure you wanna kill him?”

“Son of a bitch didn’t think twice about icing me a thousand times.”

“Two hundred, give or take,” Aurora offers, and everyone elects to ignore her. 

“No, I know, I mean, I’m just saying-“

“What are you saying?” Dean challenges. “If you don’t want to kill him, then what?”

“Talk to him?”

“What?” Dean and Machaera ask in tandem, then give each other annoyed looks. They haven’t done that since they were little. 

“Think about it, Dean. He’s one of the most powerful creatures we’ve ever met. Maybe we can use him.” And if they could, he’s damn near unkillable. 

“For what?”

“Okay, Trickster’s like a Hugh Hefner type, right? Wine, women, song- maybe he doesn’t want the party to end. Maybe he hates this angels and demons stuff as much as we do. Maybe he’ll help us.”

And maybe the angels will just fuck off and leave them all alone. “You’re serious.”

“Yeah.”

“Ally with the Trickster?” Machaera asks, disgusted. 

“Yeah.”

“A bloody, violent monster, and you wanna be Facebook friends with him? Nice, Sammy.”

“The world is gonna end, Dean. We don’t have the luxury of a moral stand. Look, I’m just saying it’s worth a shot. That’s all. If it doesn’t work, we’ll kill him.”

Dean and Machaera sigh. That’s a stupid-ass idea, and they all know it. They couldn’t kill him with the regular Trickster methods before, and it was difficult even trying to. Who knows what kind of hell he’ll put them through for trying this. On top of that, Dean’s still alive, which the Trickster made very clear he didn’t approve of.

“How are we gonna find the guy, anyway?”

“Well, he never takes just one victim, right? He’ll show.”

And if he doesn’t, they’re screwed. 

“Um, Dispatch? I, I got a possible 187 out here at the old paper mill on Route 6?” The scanner calls out, and they all focus on it. 

“Hey.”

“Roger that,” Dispatch replies. “What are you looking at there, son?”

“Honestly, Walt, I, I wouldn’t even know how to describe what I’m seeing. Just- send everybody.”

“All right, stay calm, stay by your car. Help’s on the way.”

Sam turns the scanner off and they sit quietly for a moment, Aurora and Machaera preparing for battle. 

“That sounds weird.”

“Weird enough to be our guy.”


	4. What You See Is What You Get Part Two

 

“What the hell?”

They’re in the middle of a hospital, doctors and nurses and the occasional patient bustling around them. Machaera lifts her paws to inspect the rubber-soled booties she and Aurora both have on, twisting to try and get a look at the white hospital daemon vests, their names embroidered along the sides in the same script as on Sam and Dean’s lab coats. 

“Doctor?” Sam queries, and something seems oddly familiar, but Dean can’t place it.

Dean turns around, yanking open the door they just walked through to reveal two people making out in the janitor’s closet. He shuts it, confused, and turns back to Sam as one of the hot brunette doctors leaves Reception to approach them. 

“Doctor,” she greets Sam, and slaps him. 

“Ow!” he protests, and Aurora steps closer. 

“Seriously.”

“What?” he protests, and Dean and Machaera settle back for the show.

“Seriously? You’re brilliant, you know that? And a coward. You’re a brilliant coward.”

“Um. What are you talking about?”

Sam doesn’t have time to react before she slaps him again. “As if you don’t know!” she spits, and stalks off.

And then it clicks. 

They’re in _Dr. Sexy, MD_. 

Now he just has to make Sam believe it and somehow, get the hell out.

Everything’s perfect, only too perfect. Dr. Sexy wants to have a discussion with him, even if it is about an experimental face transplant- the fuck, medicine?- and then Machaera speaks up.

“You’re not Dr. Sexy,” she says, and Dean doesn’t hesitate before slamming him against the wall. 

“You’re crazy.”

“Really?” Machaera queries. “Because I swore part of what makes Dr. Sexy sexy is the fact that he wears cowboy boots. Not tennis shoes.” She spits the last accusation out and Dean looks down- white tennis shoes, not the boots. The Boots. They deserve capitalization.

“Yeah. You’re not a fan.” Sam’s holding back a laugh.

“It’s a guilty pleasure,” Dean snaps. 

“Call security,” Dr. Sexy instructs.

“Yeah, go ahead, pal. See, we know who you are,” Dean says, and the entire world freeze-frames around them as Dr. Sexy turns back into the Trickster. Not just any Trickster, the same Trickster who took great pleasure in murdering him. Peachy. 

“You guys are getting better!” he lilts, Dr. Sexy’s daemon morphing into a mirror of Aurora this time except inky black, then to a snake which slithers up to drape across his neck like a scaly scarf. He creates his own reality. The only others who even slightly manage the same are angels, with their whole too-alive thing. Cas has tried explaining it, but it doesn’t help a whole lot.

It doesn’t get better from there. ‘Survive the next twenty-four hours, we’ll talk’ and all that bull. How are they even supposed to tell time when Sam’s doing impromptu surgery on Dean’s gunshot wound with Machaera prowling the edges of the room or watching Sam fail at the Japanese game show Nutcracker. The fact that Cas can’t help them, the helpless look he gives  Dean before he vanishes, does a whole lot for not making him feel better. 

And then the genital herpes commercial, where at least Dean can appreciate that this time, the Trickster seems to have it out for Sam, not him. Or maybe it’s always been about Sam and this time, he’s decided not to play gently. Dean’s sure as hell not complaining.

And then they’re in a _sitcom_. A sitcom, complete with a laugh track for _every damn thing they say_. Everything. 

“How long do we have to keep doing this?” he asks through a forced grin. Machaera’s had enough of the humiliation and already retreated to the bedroom, making him take a few steps that way to keep her in the comfortable part of their range. Aurora doesn’t push it, staying underneath the table with her back to the camera. 

“I don’t know,” Sam grits out, to the tune of more applause. “Maybe forever?”

Laugh track.

“We might die in here.”

Laugh track. 

Dean’s never going to enjoy anything with a laugh track _ever_ again. Fucking Trickster. 

“How was that funny?” he snaps. “Vultures.”

The laugh track just goes again until the door opens, and in steps his angel. Cas is hurt, but not too badly, and the vultures cheer. 

“You okay?” Dean would step closer, but Machaera seems intent on not moving. 

“I don’t have much time,” he says, his daemon Septimana currently a black kitten with blue eyes perched on his shoulder. 

“What happened?”

“I got out,” Cas answers, and Septimana leaps off his shoulder, shifting into an equally dark bird, and lands on Dean’s shoulder in a move that Dean keeps trying to tell Cas is kind of intimate and he keeps not understanding anyways. Septimana shifts back to a kitten, one of her favored forms, and rubs her head along the underside of his jaw. 

“From where?”

“Listen to me,” Cas says, and they are, but it isn’t exactly easy with Septimana purring and digging her claws in to make herself stable. “Something is not right. This thing is much more powerful than it should be.”

“What thing- the Trickster?”

“If it is a trickster.” Aurora’s ears prick up with interest. Sam’s theorized this before, but they never found enough proof to come to any other conclusion. 

“What do you mean?”

Abruptly, Cas is flung backwards into the wall next to the door, and the Trickster leaps into the doorway, posing for the camera. 

“Hello!”

The audience goes wild and Cas gets up, a perfect line of duct tape over his mouth. Septimana makes an annoyed hiss in Dean’s ear, but doesn’t speak. She’s normally pretty quiet, but Dean’d think that if Cas couldn’t speak, she’d talk. Spell of some kind, then, and the Trickster’s using duct tape for emphasis. Would be right up his alley. 

“Thank you. Thank you, ladies,” the Trickster says, taking a little bow, his daemon currently some kind of dog that stands on its hind legs to do tricks while he does so.

Castiel glares and Septimana hisses. The Trickster turns to Castiel, that shit-eating grin still on his face. 

“Hi, Castiel,” he lilts, and makes a gesture towards him. Castiel vanishes in a burst of static, dragging Septimana along with him a second later. 

“You know him?” Sam questions, which is a stupid question because clearly he does know Castiel, he just proved that.

“Where did you just send him?” Dean insists, Machaera padding towards him again with her fur on end. 

“Relax, he’ll live… Maybe,” he drawls, and the laugh track runs again.

“All right, you know what? I am _done_ with the monkey dance, okay? We get it.”

“Yeah? Get what, hotshot?”

“Playing our roles, right? That’s your game?” 

“That’s half the game,” the Trickster hedges.

“What’s the other half?” Sam asks, and Dean’s thankful that he can finally look away from the Trickster because he’s pretty sure the monster’s checking his brother out and if that isn’t typical, he doesn’t know what is. 

“Play your roles out there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean snarls, because he has a sneaking suspicion and he doesn’t like it.

“Oh, you know. Sam, starring as Lucifer,” the Trickster begins, grandstanding. “Dean, starring as Michael. Your celebrity death match. Play. Your. Roles.”

“You want us to say yes to those sons of bitches?”

“Hells, yeah. Let’s light this candle!”

“We do that, the world will end.” Aurora finally gets up to stand by Sam, for all the good her protection will have. 

“Yeah? And whose fault is that?” His daemon shifts to a bird of prey, screeching around their heads. “Who popped Lucifer out of the box? Hm? Look, it’s started. You started it. It can’t be stopped. So let’s get it over with!”

Sam glares and Aurora growls. 

“Heaven or hell, which side you on?” Dean questions, because that’s the only answer.

“I’m not on either side.”

Bull. “Yeah, right. You’re grabbing ankle for Michael or Lucifer. Which one is it?”

“You listen to me, you arrogant dick.” The Trickster’s perpetual amusement falls from his face, replaced by an ugly snarl of anger. “I don’t work for either of those S.O.B.s. Believe me.”

“Oh, you’re somebody’s bitch.” 

The Trickster crosses the room quickly, slamming Dean into the wall while his daemon screeches and threatens Sam to stay back on peril of talons.

“Don’t you ever, _ever_ presume to know what I am. Now listen very closely. Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna suck it up, accept your responsibilities, and play the roles that destiny has chosen for you.”

“And if we don’t?” Sam asks. The Trickster grins at him. 

“Then you’ll stay here in TV Land. Forever. Three hundred channels and, uh, nothing’s on.” His daemon settles on his shoulder, shifting slightly.

“Magpie,” Aurora says, and the Trickster doesn’t accept nor deny it before he raises one hand and snaps.

The world shifts, and they both dig their fingers into their daemon’s ruffs until it settles again.

They’re in the dark, outside a ring of crime scene tape. People bustle around them taking pictures, lights flashing everywhere, while people work inside cataloguing evidence. They turn to look at each other, in unfamiliar matching suits and sunglasses. Machaera and Aurora look at each other with horror, at their animal vests with the police logo. 

“Oh, come on,” Machaera complains as a police officer ducks under the tape to join them.

“So, what do you think?” the officer asks.

“What do I think? I think go screw yourself, that’s what I think,” Dean snaps.

“Uh, could you give us a sec, please? Thanks,” Sam dismisses the man, turning on Dean. “You gotta calm down.”

“Calm down?” Dean argues and Machaera growls. “I am wearing _sunglasses_ at _night_.” He yanks them off angrily, waving them at Sam’s face. “You know who does that? No-talent douchebags.”

Sam nods in agreement. He’s no idiot, and he knows Dean. He knows when to back off and let him rant. Machaera’s all puffed up, stalking circles and hissing at any daemons that get too close to her. 

“I hate this game. I hate that we’re in a procedural cop show and you wanna know why? Because I _hate_ procedural cop shows. There’s like three hundred of them on television and they’re all the freaking same. It’s ooh, plane crashed here- oh shut up.”

Sam takes off his sunglasses to get a better look at the crime scene, interrupting Dean. “Hey.”

“What?” Dean snaps.

“Check out sweet tooth over there.” Sam points to one of the officers, sucking a lollipop over the corpse. 

“Think that’s him?”

“Just, um, follow my lead.”

Real convincing. 

Whatever. Dean follows as they put on their sunglasses and step under the crime scene tape. 

“You, uh, you okay?” 

“Yeah.” Which is terribly convincing, with Machaera stalking around chasing the other daemons away and Aurora sitting passively by Sam. “What do we got?”

The officer kneels down by the body, inspecting it again. “Well, aside from the ligature marks around his neck, he has what appears to be a roll of quarters jammed down his throat.”

Dean takes off his sunglasses, reaching for his flashlight, and looks closer. Like he knows what to do. Sam mirrors him.

“Well, I say, jackpot.” Sam puts his sunglasses back on and Dean and Machaera both stare in shock, because that isn’t like Sam. The officer snorts in laughter.

“Also, there is a stab wound to the lower abdomen.” He indicates the bloodstain with his lollipop. Dean pokes it with a stick, because everything is better after being poked with a stick, and puts his own sunglasses back on. 

“Well, I say, no guts, no glory.” He winces and Machaera turns away, burying her nose in the ground before a monkey daemon gets too close.

“Get that guy a Tums.”

“Gutter ball.”

The officer keeps laughing and Machaera turns her back on Dean, morally offended.

“Good one, guys.” 

Dean steps behind him with the stick he poked the corpse with, shoving it through him when he turns to follow. He collapses, gasping for breath, and nobody around them cares. Another officer doubles over laughing and morphs into the Trickster.

“You’ve got the wrong guy, _idiot_.”

“Did we?” Machaera asks, stepping up alongside Dean again. Sam stakes the Trickster from behind, cutting off his laughter, and the world explodes into static again.

And then they’re back in the warehouse, back in their regular clothes, and the Trickster is still downed with a stake through his back.


	5. What You See Is What You Get Part Three

 

“I’m worried, man,” Dean says back in the hotel room the next morning. “What that SOB did to Cas. You know, where he is?”

No response. 

“Machaera, will you go bite the idiot and wake him up?”

“If I must,” she says, padding out of the motel bathroom. “Dean?”

Dean follows her out into the empty room and curses. Not hide nor hair of Sam nor Aurora. Shit.

They head straight for the Impala, because he can’t be far, with Dean already calling Sam and absentmindedly opening the door for Machaera. He gets Sam’s voicemail, because of-fucking-course he does, as he slides into the front seat. 

“Sam. It’s me. Where the hell did you go?”

“Dean?” 

Dean looks around to the few places in the car not taken up by himself or Machaera. Nothing. “Sam? Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“The dashboard, Dean,” Machaera says, pointing with one paw. There’s a light there, flashing in time with Sam’s words.

“Oh, crap. I don’t think we killed the Trickster,” Sam says, and Dean would slam his fist into the dashboard if it weren’t his baby.

Dean drives, letting it focus his frustration so Machaera doesn’t rip up his seats.

“Okay, stake didn’t work. So, what, this is another trick?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the stake didn’t work because it’s not a trickster?” 

“What do you mean?”

“You heard Cas. He said this thing was too powerful to be a trickster.” Which bodes well for their successes. They hated their inability to hunt the bastard. 

“And did you notice the way he looked at Cas? Almost like he knew him.”

“And how pissed he got when you brought up Michael and Lucifer.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dean curses, because there’s only one of those dicks he wants to deal with and he’s missing right now. 

“What?”

“I think I know what we’re dealing with.”

 

***

 

He chooses Centennial Point Wilderness Area to make their stand, and digs the appropriate tools out of the Impala’s trunk.

“Dean?” Sam asks, in his awkward-topic voice.

“What?”

“That, uh, feels really uncomfortable.”

Machaera takes a few steps backwards and Dean stares at the Impala in shock, then slams the trunk a little harder than necessary. 

“Ow! You sure this is gonna work?”

“No, but I have no other ideas.” Dean steps around the Impala… Sam… whatever his baby is now and shouts at the sky. “All right, you son of a bitch! Uncle! We’ll do it!”

Nothing.

“Should I honk?”

“Very helpful, Sam,” Machaera says, giving Sam her best disdainful tail flick.

“Wow, Sam. Get a load of the rims on you,” the Trickster says, appearing out of nowhere. 

“Eat me.”

The Trickster gives Sam a considering look and Dean looks away because he doesn’t need to see another monster flirting with his brother, he does enough of that and half the time, he has to be the one to gank them later.

“Okay, boys. Ready to go quietly?”

“Whoa whoa whoa. Not so fast. Nobody’s going anywhere until Sam has opposable thumbs.” Machaera brushes against him in a reminder that ‘opposable thumbs’ gives so much wiggle room and this would be the dick to take it and make his brother a gorilla. 

“What’s the difference?” the Trickster sing-songs. “Satan’s going to ride his ass oen way or another.”

Dean and Machaera glare at him. The Trickster rolls his eyes and snaps. Sam climbs out of the backseat, Aurora on his heels.

“Happy?”

“Tell me one thing,” Dean ignores his question. “Why didn’t the stake kill you?”

“I am the Trickster,” he grins. 

“Or maybe you’re not,” Dean says, and Sam flicks his cigarette lighter, tossing it to the ground. It catches the holy oil they’d laid there, flaming into life around the Trickster. “Maybe you’ve always been an angel.”

The Trickster stares at them with wide eyes, then laughs. “A what? Somebody slip a mickey in your power shake, kid?”

The Trickster’s daemon shifts back into a magpie, but stays perched on his shoulder instead of flying. 

“I’ll tell you what,” Dean grins. “You just jump out of the holy fire and we’ll call it our mistake.” Machaera circles the ring one more time, then sits by Dean’s side and bares her teeth. 

The Trickster laughs, which slowly trickles off into silence. The world fades to static again, and they’re back in the warehouse. He claps slowly, keeping his eyes on them the entire time.

“Well played, boys. Well played. Where’d you get the holy oil?”

“Well, you might say we pulled it out of Sam’s ass.”

The Trickster raises an eyebrow consideringly, giving Sam a once-over. “Where’d I screw up?”

“You didn’t. Nobody gets the jump on Cas like you did.”

“Mostly it was the way you talked about Armageddon,” Dean adds.

“Meaning?”

“Well, call it personal experience, but nobody gets that angry unless they’re talking about their own family.” Machaera starts doing rounds around the circle of holy fire in opposition with Aurora, forcing the Trickster’s daemon to watch one so he can watch the other. 

“So which one are you?” Sam follows up. “Grumpy, Sneezy, or Douchey?”

The Trickster pauses, and his face falls. “Gabriel, okay? They call me Gabriel.”

“Gabriel? The archangel?”

“Guilty.”

“Okay, Gabriel,” Dean continues. “How does an archangel become a trickster?”

“My own private witness protection. I skipped out of heaven, had a face transplant, carved out my own little corner of the world. Till you two screwed it all up.” Gabriel’s daemon shifts to something small, slipping inside his coat.

“What did Daddy say when you ran off and joined the pagans?” Dean asks, because if Sam going to college majorly pissed off Dad he can’t imagine how much God himself must have disapproved of one of his archangels, his original children, joining the pagans. 

“Daddy doesn’t say anything about anything.”

“Then what happened?” Sam asks, frowning. “Why’d you ditch?”

“Do you blame him?” Dean rounds on Sam. “I mean, his brothers are heavyweight douchenozzles.”

Gabriel almost snarls, and from somewhere in his jacket his daemon hisses in annoyance. “Shut your cakehole. You don’t know anything about my family. I love my father, my brothers. Love them. But watching them turn on each other? Tear at each other’s throats? I couldn’t bear it! Okay? So I left. And now it’s happening all over again.” The angel shrinks in on himself, closing his eyes for a moment to pull himself together. 

“Then help us stop it.”

“It can’t be stopped,” he argues. 

“You wanna see the end of the world?” Machaera asks when Sam and Dean don’t speak up.

“I want it to be over!” The archangel is perfectly happy to round on the tiger. “I have to sit back and watch my own brothers kill each other thanks to you two! Heaven, hell, I don’t care who wins, I just want it to be over.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that. There has to be some way to, to pull the plug.” 

Gabriel throws back his head and laughs. “You do not know my family. What you guys call the apocalypse, I used to call Sunday dinner. That’s why there’s no stopping this, because this isn’t about a way. It’s about two brothers that loved each other and betrayed each other. You’d think you’d be able to relate.”

“What are you talking about?” Aurora asks this time, not stopping her pacing even when Machaera does. 

“You sorry sons of bitches. Why do you think you two are the vessels? Think about it. Michael, the big brother, loyal to an absent father, and Lucifer, the little brother, rebellious of Daddy’s plan.” Clearly, the grandstanding isn’t a thing he affected as the Trickster, because his drama has not been reduced one bit. “You were born to this, boys. It’s your destiny! It was always you! As it is in heaven, so it must be on earth. One brother has to kill the other.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Dean spits.

“Why do you think I’ve always taken such an interest in you? Because from the moment Dad flipped on the lights around here, we knew it was all gonna end with you. Always.”

He falls silent, and Sam and Dean both look at their feet, then up at each other again. The archangel stands placidly in the circle, bitterness etched across his features. 

“No.” Dean finally speaks up. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“I’m sorry. But it is.” The angel actually sounds sorry, which is the weird thing, and sighs, taking half a step towards the edge of the circle but leaving a distance between him and the flames.

“Guys. I wish this were a TV show. Easy answers, endings wrapped up in a bow… but this is real, and it’s gonna end bloody for all of us. That’s just how it’s gotta be.” The archangel takes his step back, going boneless for a moment, and then the tension seeps back into his spine. “So. Boys. Now what? We stare at each other for the rest of eternity?”

“Well, first of all, you’re gonna bring Cas back from wherever you stashed him.” Dean doesn’t forget family, and Cas is sure as hell family now. 

“Oh, am I,” Gabriel says dryly. 

“Yeah. Or we’re going to dunk you in some holy oil and deep-fry ourselves an archangel.”

Gabriel suppresses a wince but his daemon squeaks, still hidden from sight, and he raises his hand and snaps. Cas appears next to them, still bloodied, but not looking much more damaged than he was before. Dean checks. 

“Cas, you okay?” he asks, verifying what he can’t see.

“I’m fine. Hello, Gabriel.”

“Hey, bro,” the archangel says, not too pleased to see him. “How’s the search for Daddy going? Let me guess. Awful.”

Cas glares back at him, Septimana growing in size from a kitten to a cat and hissing, somehow without losing her balance on Cas’ shoulder. Dean suspects she has some of Cas’ abilities, flight among them.

“Okay, we’re out of here,” Dean decides. “Come on, Sam.” He doesn’t have to tell Cas to come with them. Cas always knows when he’s needed, and he’s sure as hell needed right now. Dean turns and walks away, Machaera following, and neither of them look back.

“Uh. Okay. Guys?” Gabriel calls, as Sam follows Dean. “So, so what? Huh?” Castiel turns away from his brother, following Dean, and Gabriel’s expression hardens, his bravado brittle and cracking. “You’re just gonna, you’re gonna leave me here forever?”

Dean stops at the door, turning back, and shakes his head at him. “No. We’re not, ‘cause we don’t screw with people the way you do. And for the record? This isn’t about some prize fight between your brothers or some destiny that can’t be stopped. This is about you being too afraid to stand up to your family.”

Dean yanks the fire alarm. Gabriel tips his face to the roof as the sprinklers go off and water drips across his features, slowly turning back to them with his eyes closed. 

“Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After this, I go off-script. I promise. I just wanted to do some background rather than having oodles of flashbacks.


	6. Razor's Edge

 

Improbable escapes are part and parcel of their whole lives, but things start to get a little too improbable about a week and a half later, after the next time Cas visits them- well, Dean. Sam can just about scream himself hoarse unless he mentions Dean’s name and Cas won’t come to his prayers, but Dean so much as mentions him and the angel’s there. 

Over breakfast, laughing about Cas’ perpetual confusion over regular human food- angel in the booth crowding Dean’s space. On a hunt, one curse of _dammit, Castiel, your feathery butt would be real useful right now_ and he appears in the middle, his angel blade whistling through whatever the monster of the day, with a disclaimer of _my butt doesn’t have feathers, Dean, I don’t understand_. He lets Sam do research without any help, but the minute Dean has to do research, it’s calling for the angel to do it for him.

For a while, it only happens while Cas is there or when he’s just recently left. Weapons tossed out of their hands that are miraculously within reach again. Monsters, even ghosts, that slip and fall when catching them unprepared. The surprising lack of any angels managing to find them despite Zachariah the Asshole no doubt having eyes out for him, even better than after Cas put the sigils on their ribs. 

Sometimes, he can almost hear the whisper of wings when they’re alone, but Dean thinks he’s overreacting. Dean always thinks he’s overreacting, that it’s probably Cas checking that they’re not in too much trouble to call for him. 

It just starts to get a little too weird, that Cas would start doing that when he never had before. Why would he extend even more power to do that when he gets weaker every day?

It isn’t rational, and Sam doesn’t like selectively irrational things. Either things are completely random or they’re logical. They don’t switch between the two and Cas certainly doesn’t. He follows logic. Angel programming and all that.

Sam keeps it to himself, but he watches and he waits. He can be patient, and this way he doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. 

“You go this way,” Dean whispers in a particularly vicious multiple haunting. “Be careful, Sammy.” Machaera bumps up against Aurora, making her stagger sideways. It’s always been sort of comical. Machaera forgets how much larger she is than Aurora, while it’s Sam that sometimes forgets how much taller he is than Dean. 

“I will,” he promises, shotgun at the ready with a bag of salt at his belt. Aurora carries more, spare bags of salt she can grab and rip open with her teeth to protect them and spare shells for Sam. Ghosts don’t have daemons, not as independent parts of themselves, but they usually remember enough to go after daemons to subdue their prey. 

It’s the thing that gets the most new hunters killed, not protecting their daemons. Taboo only protects so far, and the dead care little for it. Make that not at all. 

They stalk through the house, sweeping each room as they go with Aurora’s ears pricked for noise and her head on a swivel, Sam watching EMF and Aurora’s blindspots. It’s almost easier this way. He and Dean don’t need to say much aloud, but it’s still more than either one of them needs to say to their daemon. He can tell if Aurora sees something before she even has a moment to speak.

The ghosts come after them and he disperses them time and time again, Aurora sealing rooms off with salt lines while he watches her back. They’d do it the other way since her senses are keener than his, but Dean still hasn’t managed to design a firearm Aurora or Machaera can fire consistently enough and with proper aim. 

With his luck, one sneaks up behind him while she’s salting a room, and this one’s strong enough to give him a nasty shock, attacking the one thing he can’t protect: his bond with Aurora. She yelps in pain and whines as they’re flung to opposite corners of the room by two of the ghosts. Darkness closes in, and he braces himself for whatever strikes these particular ghosts’ fancy.

_“CLOSE YOUR EYES,”_ a voice booms around him, and even through closed lids he can see the light explode in the room.

As unconsciousness takes him, his last thought is that Cas really could have had better timing to find his mojo again. 

 

***

 

Fur.

And doggy breath.

Sam scrunches his nose up and cracks one eye open, worried that he ought to be feeling a lot more awful after they attacked his bond like that. Aurora’s stirring on the other side of the motel bed, his hand threaded into the fur behind her head in standard recovery position for any person after unexpected unconsciousness. 

He digs his fingers in deeper and closes his eyes, feeling for their bond. It’s still intact, and not only that, he feels Aurora better than he has since the last time he drank demon blood. Not much better, but a little. 

“Hell of a time to find your mojo again, Cas,” he says, letting Aurora snuggle closer and burying his face in her fur. In a very un-wolfish way, she smells faintly of motel room detergent and Sam’s aftershave and the faint tang of blood and ectoplasm. 

“Sorry, kiddo, not Castiel. My little brother barely has the juice to fly these days, so not a chance of him swooping in at the last minute to move a few ghosts on, and oh, what was that? Save your bacon.”

“Didn’t ask you to,” he coughs through a throat that feels far too dry, trying to sit up without taking his hand out of Aurora’s fur. Gabriel is sitting on the other side of the motel room, perched on the table with a rather impressive pile of candy wrappers falling off to the floor below him. His daemon is a magpie again, perched on the lamp between the beds. 

“Doesn’t mean you didn’t need it. Deano is fine, by the way, since you didn’t ask. Dragged my brother out of his moping and threw him in there when I dragged you out.” Gabriel frowns at his lollipop, shifting it from green apple to strawberry.

“Where are they?”

“Mmm, left them in an all-night diner with a handful of movie tickets in Castiel’s pocket and the understanding that it’s movie night, you’re fine, and I was never here.”

“He’ll tell Dean anyways.”

“I may have wiped myself from his memory and just left my orders. Never would have made it out of Heaven centuries ago if I couldn’t make anyone but Mikey, Lucy, and Raphael forget me.”

Sam frowns. “No nickname for Raphael?”

“It irritated Mikey and Lucy. Raphael never cared. Bo~ring.” Gabriel tosses a wrapped candy across the room. His daemon shifts to some sort of falcon, nearly tipping over the lamp as the candy changes to a chunk of meat at the apex of the arc. 

Sam shakes off all the questions that inspires because if he gets into a discussion of the reality of angel life in Heaven in the early years with and archangel who has been there since the beginning, he’ll be there for years and there’s a little thing called the Apocalypse coming. Gabriel seems content to watch him think and occasionally toss morsels to his daemon. 

It seems to be an angel thing, not offering their daemon’s names. Dean finally outright asked Cas, and that’s a pretty big breach of etiquette. Demons pretend, but they’re just dragging along their vessel’s daemon. Angels have their own. Jimmy Novak’s daemon was a terrier named Rocco, not Septimana, so it isn’t an oversight based on not having their own. 

“Epistola.”

“What?”

“Her name’s Epistola. But she’s gone by Stropha for millennia since I left.” With a rustle of wings, Gabriel and Epistola are gone, leaving Sam and Aurora completely alone. 

“I still don’t understand,” he tells Aurora.

“At least he healed you,” she says. “Papercut from the stationary fight you had last night with Dean and everything.”

Sam inspects his hands. Not only is the papercut gone, so are the scrapes from Dean bumping him into a wall, the burn from a lighter the other day, and the fading claw marks from when he spooked Machaera three weeks ago. 

“Thanks for that, Gabriel,” he says to the empty room, and a fun-sized Three Musketeers appears on Aurora’s nose.

 

***

 

“I have tickets to a moving picture.”

Cas pulls a handful of tickets out of his pocket, all stapled together in pairs. And then another handful. There can’t even be that many movies out right now, and sure as hell not in a town this size. 

“You don’t say, Cas.”

Cas cocks his head to the side and glances down at his hands. “I do say.”

“It’s an expression,” Machaera whispers to Septimana when Dean just returns to his pie. Septimana cocks her head to the side in a mirror of Cas, equally as confused, and Machaera really ought to have known better. 

“Alright, then. What movie are we seeing?”

“It seems to be thirty-nine pairs of tickets for a moving picture called Date Night. I’m told that Las Vegas and Paris are nice this time of year.”

Dean stares at him. “Where did you get all of those?”

“My pocket.”

Well, what the hell. Probably a trap, but both the angels and demons have gotten a whole lot bolder about their traps the further into the Apocalypse they get. Plus, he thinks it’s probably below Zachariah’s dignity to ambush him and Cas at a romcom. Dude seems big on dignity.

“Not feeling Paris, Cas. Where else do you have tickets to?”

 

***

 

Cas spends the entire movie sitting ramrod straight in his seat, staring at the screen without blinking. Dean can’t decide whether to watch the movie or watch Cas to see if anything ruffles his composure. 

After the previews roll, Septimana, currently an inky kitten again- he’s asked Cas about that, to which his best reply is ‘do you not like kittens, Dean?’- leaves Cas’ lap to curl up under Machaera’s head in the hollow between her paws. Halfway through the movie, she starts wandering up and down Machaera’s back, kneading her paws in her stripes. After a while, she starts being outright kittenish, getting ready to pounce on Machaera, who just flattens her ears and tucks her tail away. 

Septimana twists in midair, making an impossible maneuver, and lands squarely on Dean’s lap, purring. 

“Cas, we’ve talked about this,” he whispers. 

“She is an independent part of me, Dean, I do not control her actions.”

“Machaera.” She stands up, stretching in the tight space of the aisleway, and plucks Septimana off his lap by the scruff of her neck, then lies back down with her paws wrapped around the much smaller kitten. 

That last for all of ten minutes before Septimana wriggles loose again, and another fifteen before she’s back on his lap, shifting into a sparrow mid-leap to get to his shoulder and then shifting back to a kitten to land there. Septimana paws at his cheek until he tips his head towards her, then uses his jaw to scratch her head, purring loudly. 

When he turns to look, Cas is watching him instead of the movie, fixing him with that unblinking stare. 

“She likes you.”

“Thanks. I hadn’t noticed.”

Septimana stays there, doing the almost-sleep daemons do when they’re completely relaxed, for the rest of the movie. Dean pretends to watch and Cas doesn’t even bother pretending he’s not watching Dean, which he’s learning is pretty damn typical. Nobody ever told him that having an angel on his shoulder meant quite so much watching him sleep. 

“Time to go, Cas,” he says as the credits roll. Cas grabs his shoulder, and he and Machaera are back in the motel room with Sam sleeping on the other side, and the angel is gone. 

“You better share, Machaera,” he warns her as she sprawls across the top of the covers.

“Of course,” she mocks, sprawling on top of him instead.


	7. I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)

 

_Sioux Falls, South Dakota_

 

Sam lifts the heart out of the box, inspecting it while Machaera puts her paws on the table to get a better look and makes bad puns to Aurora. Dean hums and sways from side to side, which only eggs her on. 

“Check this out.” Sam tips the heart towards Dean, revealing some sort of shining silver… brand, maybe. “It looks like some kind of letter.”

Dean rolls the other one in its box, tipping the same side up to reveal the same marking. 

“Oh, no.” Sam sets it back in the box.

“What?”

“I think it’s Enochian.”

“You mean like angel scratches? So you think it’s like the tagging on our ribs?” 

“Dean, I don’t know,” Sam says, and Dean snaps off his gloves and hits his speed-dial before he even finishes.

“Cas, it’s Dean. Yeah, room 31-c, basement level… St. James medical center.”

Wings rustle and Cas appears in the room, almost nose-to-nose with Dean, and Sam’s pretty sure Cas must have a homing device on Dean’s ribs because he never lands in Sam’s personal space that way. 

“I’m there now,” Cas tells his phone, staring Dean straight in the eyes. Septimana swoops off his shoulder, landing on Machaera’s head and staying there as a stubborn raven. 

“Yeah, I get that.”

“I’m gonna hang up now.”

“Right.”

Cas crosses the room to the open containers, inspecting the hearts. “You’re right, Sam. These are angelic marks. I imagine you’ll find similar marks on that other couples’ hearts as well.”

“So, what are they? I mean, what do they mean?”

“It’s a mark of union. This man and woman were intended to mate.” Cas steps away from the table, brushing against Machaera. Dean shivers as tendrils of sensation crawl along his side, a hot burning touch completely different from the ice of demons and ghosts manhandling her. 

“Cas.”

“My apologies, Dean,” Cas inclines his head, but doesn’t move, and the brush of sensation focuses to the single steady point of contact, Cas’ knee against Machaera’s front leg, and Dean knows without a shadow of a doubt that it’s deliberate. It burns on his shoulder, exactly where Cas left his handprint dragging him out of Hell. 

“Okay, but who put them there?” Dean asks to break the tension, glancing away from Cas’ even stare to the bloodied hearts on the table.

“Your people call them ‘Cupid’,” an all-too-familiar voice rings out from behind them. “I try to avoid calling them. The secret Cherub handshake? Awful.”

Cas’ angel blade slides into his hand, Septimana shifting into a dark version of Machaera. Machaera joins her, Aurora flanking her other side. Gabriel lounges against the other side of the lab, wearing a lab coat embroidered with his name flanked by a pair of wings, 

“Gabriel.”

“Castiel!” Gabriel materializes a sucker out of thin air, using it like a pointer. “Still nothing from Daddy? Thought so. I know a futile cause when I see one.”

Castiel glares, Septimana puffing up more like an overgrown cat than a tiger. Gabriel and his daemon smirk, and Dean doesn’t know how he can tell the bird’s smirking but it is. Sam, at the corner of his vision, is far too relaxed despite his scowl and Aurora isn’t nearly enough on edge. 

“Enough of the angel posturing,” he interrupts the standoff. “Cas, is Cupid killing people?”

“A cherub, third-class,” Cas replies.

“Cupid,” Gabriel corrects. 

“The little flying fat kid in diapers?”

Cas frowns at him. “They’re not incontinent.” Gabriel dissolves into laughter, waving Cas off when he gives him the confused look. “A Cupid has gone rogue, and we have to stop him before he kills again.”

Dean rolls his eyes. Of course they do. It’s an angel problem, but clearly the non-renegade angels won’t do jack squat about it. Which leaves him, Sam, one angel with dwindling power, and possibly one archangel who is singlehandedly responsible for most of Dean’s deaths. 

“And how are we supposed to find our killer Cupid?”

Gabriel grins around his lollipop, raises his hand, and snaps. Dean squeezes his eyes shut, hoping like hell that Cas can get them out of whatever hellhole Gabriel drops them it. 

 

***

 

“I’ve got two cheeseburgers, a salad, and an extra-large ice cream sundae with extra sprinkles here.”

Gabriel directs plates, glancing around the restaurant before wiggling his fingers and doubling the size of his sundae. Dean and Cas are on one side of the booth, Machaera stretched across the back in her usual spot, which is confirmation that Gabriel’s been stalking them. Septimana is draped across both of their laps, squished until she shifts into a black python and slithers up to rest behind their necks, her head on Dean’s shoulder and her tail on Castiel’s. Aurora’s a comforting weight on his feet, carefully not touching anyone else, while Gabriel’s Epistola shifted to a little bat and is hanging off the lamp over top of the table. 

“It’s a cheeseburger, Deano, not a crocodile-infested pit with rabid chipmunks on either side. I applaud you for your creativity, though.”

Dean cracks one eye open, staring at his burger, before tentatively checking the condiment status and reaching for the ketchup. Cas just stares at his, slightly confused, until Dean swaps them out and fixes Cas’ burger too. 

“Angels do not eat mortal food,” he says as Dean gives him a pool of salted ketchup for his fries.

“Wrong again, little brother. _Boring_ angels don’t. Are you a boring angel, Castiel?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Eat your burger, Cas. Why are we here?” Dean bites into his own, slowing down and exaggerating his chewing. Cas mirrors him, adding enough salt to his ketchup to wreck half the supernatural beings out there before he’s satisfied. 

“God, that’s harder to watch than your sweet tooth,” he tells Gabriel because Dean and Cas are way too wrapped up in each other right now.

“Leave Daddy out of it,” he says. “Castiel’s taste in seasonings would be far from the strangest thing he’s done. Have you seen the platypus?”

Sam can accept that. He’s seen Dean eat weirder things. He’s pretty sure Dean would eat anything if it were made into a pie. Hell, they haven’t really seen Gabriel eat anything but sugar, so health food isn’t exactly high on the angelic food chain. 

Dean pushes away his burger and Cas snatches it up. “So, what. Cupid likes to hang out in bars on Valentine’s Day?”

“This place is a nexus of human reproduction. It’s exactly the kind of garden the Cupid will come to pollinate.” Cas speaks between bites, and it’d be nice if he could cut the archaic answers and give them something simple for once. 

“Good place to get laid,” Gabriel summarizes. “He’s here.” Cas gives Gabriel a grumpy look for beating him to the revelation, and then both angels’ heads swivel to the same side of the restaurant. 

On the other side of the restaurant, a napkin blows past a woman into the man next to her’s face. They introduce themselves and promptly start making out. 

“Meet me in the back,” Cas instructs, vanishing with Septimana.

“Spoilsport,” Gabriel replies to the empty air, and puts a banana peel by the couple’s feet so the man slips on it and misses the next time he goes for a kiss, landing face-first in her dinner instead. “Never gets old. Come on, boys, I don’t want to miss my little brother and the secret Cherub handshake.”

Gabriel snaps before Dean gets up, and they’re behind the restaurant. Cas chants, and the surprise on Dean’s face when a naked angel materializes and wraps him in a tight hug for far too long? _Priceless_. 

“Help!” he yelps, and Dean ought to be glad Bobby isn’t here because he’d let Dean live it down even less than Sam would. 

“Oh, help is on the way. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Hello, you!” Cupid drops Dean, letting him stagger backwards, and walks to Cas. He lifts him off the ground in a tight hug, swaying him from side to side.

“Mmf.”

“This is Cupid?”

“Yes.”

“I love video tape,” Gabriel sighs, lens trained on Cas. 

“And look at you, huh?” Cupid releases Cas, heading for Sam.

“No.”

Sam turns away, ready for what’s coming, and Cupid vanishes to appear in front of him with the slightest flutter of wings, lifting him off the ground.

“Yes! Yes, yes, yes!”

“Is this a fight? Are we in a fight?” Sam would try to tell Dean no, but he’s a little too busy with his ribs being squeezed into a pulp.

“This is… Their handshake.”

“I don’t like it.”

“No one likes it.”

Gabriel giggles, snapping his video camera out of temporary existence. Cupid releases Sam, walking over to Gabriel, and stops right in front of him. Cupid reaches for him, face falling as he stops just short, arms still extended awkwardly.

“I- I don’t understand,” he says mournfully, looking to Cas for explanation.

“Millennia away from home and my orders still stand. Angels, got to love them.” Gabriel conjures a chair and flops back in it, Epistola shifting to a magpie and perching on Aurora’s back. “Now, answer your Castiel’s questions before he gets irritable like the middle child he is. Seraphim, you’re all so _needy_.”

“I believe that was an insult,” Cas tells Dean seriously.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“My name is Castiel.”

“Oh, this is just priceless,” Gabriel chuckles, snapping up a banana split. 

“Why are you doing this?” Cas confronts Cupid instead of Gabriel, wiping his confusion off his face. 

“Doing what?” Cupid turns back to Cas, but doesn’t move far from Gabriel. Gabriel grimaces, then his chair turns so he’s ogling Sam instead of his naked brother. 

“Couples bearing your mark are slaughtering each other instead of the whole soppy making out and deep conversations about the meaning of poetry that’s a veiled innuendo thing you usually have them do. I like the whole psycho-date for the serial adulterer thing, but you’re just picking on innocents and my…” Gabriel waves his hand at Sam and Dean, searching for words, “them. Yeah, let’s go with them. They don’t like it.”

“You think that I… Well, uh… I don’t know what to say.” Cupid throws himself at Gabriel’s feet, bawling. 

“Shouldn’t you do something?” Sam asks.

“I can compel him to silence, but that isn’t what you want.”

“Give ‘em hell, Cas,” Dean slaps Cas on the back, pushing him towards Cupid. Cas gives him a bemused look, but crouches next to him anyways. 

“Um… so… We didn’t, um, mean it. To hurt your feelings.”

Cupid looks up at him, eyes shining, and tackles Cas to the ground in another tight hug. Gabriel laughs. Dean tries to pry Cupid off, forgetting that any go the angels are far stronger than Dean ever is. Sam stands back and watches because he knows better. 

“He doesn’t know anything,” Gabriel finally offers as Cas extricates himself from Cupid’s embrace. “Read his mind. Clean, as far as we’re concerned, though I might need to bleach my brain and I spent millennia as a hedonistic god. I will not look down on Cherubim for another two days, I think. Dude’s seen some nasty stuff.”

 

 


	8. If You Really Want To

 

“What’s the worst that could happen, right?”

Sam winces as Dean speaks. Their entire lives- well, for Sam at least- should have proven  that those words should never, ever be spoken. Or thought. Or considered in any way, shape, or form. Every time Dean says them- and it’s always Dean, he’s the only one foolish enough to continue doing that after oh, starting the Apocalypse that way- bad things happen. 

They crack the briefcase Sam stole from the demon open anyways, and that’s another think on the list he doesn’t want to think about. Not the stealing from the demon part, but the part where he recognized the demon inside the vessel and the part where he almost couldn’t drag himself away from the knife. The part Dean doesn’t know about, not yet. Hopefully, not ever. 

Light shines out of it and they flinch back. In their business, surprising bright light is far too often angel grace with all the eye-burning internal-organ-searing that entails. It isn’t hot, though, and he peeks at it briefly enough to see that it isn’t the golden glow of angel grace. 

“What the hell was that?” Dean asks as the light dims, and Sam bites his tongue just in time to not say ‘your stupid plan that could’ve gotten us killed, jerk’. 

“It’s a human soul. It’s starting to make sense.” Cas appears, munching on _another_ cheeseburger, Septimana stealing bites in between his own. Gabriel appears on Sam’s bed, pulling cookies out of thin air. 

“I’m assuming you aren’t here to be helpful?” Machaera says from her spot sprawled across Dean’s bed, watching them all with disdain. 

“That would require drawing on Heaven’s power and bringing down the wrath of Raphael, Michael, and Lucifer on my head for running away. No can do, kiddos.”

“What are we dealing with, Cas?”

“Hunger,” Gabriel cuts Cas off. “In all forms. You got yourself a Horseman. Cassie seems sure that you know what to do, despite the fact that he’s guzzling White Castle like a man dying of thirst might go after a pitcher of beer. Which is probably an accurate description.”

“I’m lost.” Dean joins Machaera, shoving her over to make enough room for him to stretch out on his back. Cas perches on the end of Dean’s bed, Septimana abandoning the burger she doesn’t actually need to eat to curl between Machaera’s front paws as a kitten. Again. Angel daemons may not settle, but Septimana certainly has a preference. 

“Everyone is starving for something. Sex, attention, drugs, love… That’s why the cherub’s marked ones devoured each other. They couldn’t get enough love, and Famine made them absolutely rabid for it.” Cas finishes his burger, tossing the wrapper into the air for Gabriel to smite, and unwraps another one immediately. 

“So, Famine just rolls into town and everybody does crazy?”

“‘And then will come Famine riding on a black steed. He will—‘“ Cas intones.

“Cut the Bible verses, Cassie, or I’ll smite you next.”

Cas gives Gabriel what, for him, might be a dirty look if they take in to account a lack of awareness of social cues and that Gabriel is one step shy of his ultimate boss. Or he might be constipated from that many cheeseburgers, heavy on the cheese. “Famine is hungry. He must devour the souls of his victims.”

“So, that’s what was in the briefcase— the Twinkie dude’s soul?” 

“Lucifer has sent—“

“Famine will have an army of Lucy’s cronies caring for him. Food, entertainment, keeping the hunters at bay, the works. Not Lucy’s finest, but he’ll make up for incompetence with volume.” Gabriel considers for a while, then throws himself back against the suddenly plush pillows. “In all aspects, I imagine, but Lucy’s habits are a freakshow anyways.”

“You should not talk about Lucifer that way. He was our brother, even if he has fallen.” 

Gabriel waves a hand and a strip of duct tape appears over Cas’ mouth. He pulls it off, wincing, and continues eating his burger without speaking. Gabriel and Dean are arguing, but it’s dim, a hum of voices beyond the ringing in his ears and the sound of his own breath

_In. Out._ His heart races and he slows his breath deliberately, pacing against the rise and fall of Dean’s chest- Cas would be easier, with the whole not talking thing, but he still forgets to breathe sometimes- and drives his fingernails into his palm. The pain gives him something to focus on, something besides the gnawing hunger eating at his insides, the poison Azazel put in him and he fed out of Ruby’s pushing and his own misguided folly. 

“So what’s your poison, Deano? You’d best know what it is that you crave, because sooner than later Famine will make you do anything for it. You’d kill for it. You’d die for it. You’d break everything in that pathetic little moral code of yours for a little more and it still wouldn’t fill that empty hole inside of you.”

“Famine isn’t messing with my head,” Dean grits out.

“Famine’s no fool. He’ll turn the full whammy of his mojo on you before you’re close enough to shoot him, so you can forget about cutting his finger off.”

Sam retreats while they argue, Machaera and Epistola staring each other down ready to pounce and Septimana choosing protection inside Cas’ coat. Aurora keeps watch by the bathroom door while he runs water as cold as he can, soaking a washcloth with it. Splashing is too loud, too obvious, but he needs to hide the cold sweat dripping down his spine and the shaking of his hands. 

He hasn’t felt this bad since Dean and Bobby tried to detox him in the panic room. He can hide it, with some determination, for now but it’s only a matter of time until the craving gets the best of him, until he either relapses and soaks himself in the blood of Famine’s keepers or the remaining demon blood in his system starts flinging him around the room. 

_Just give in,_ Lucifer whispers in his head every time the tremors resurge, _so much easier to just give in. I’ll take such good care of you._

He barely bothers with wringing out the washcloth, letting the chill chase away the feverish heat, and shakes his head in denial. 

_I can sooth the heat, Sam,_ Lucifer offers. _I burn cold, not hot like my former brothers. A single touch and I will chase away the pain, make you invulnerable._

“No,” he gasps quietly into the sink, turning off the running water. 

It’s quiet in his head, but he can feel him lurking, feel him waiting for the next weak moment, the next time he’s standing over a demon with his blade in their chest and their blood drips ever so slowly over his hand, still warm, still bearing that dark thrill of power with which he can do anything. 

It’s quiet outside his head, too. 

“I sent them away,” Gabriel tells him, leaning on the doorframe. “Off to do recon with a detour through about four fast food places for Cassie. Claims he can stop whenever he wants, which is true, but that’s true of all of Famine’s victims. They could stop if the wanted to. They don’t want to.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re a stubborn idiot. Now, with your permission, I can get you back in fighting shape so your brother doesn’t get himself killed. Somehow, I think that would upset Cassie.” Epistola leaps off his shoulder, soaring down to the ground and shifting into a fox halfway there. She brushes against Aurora, testing the waters, and then presses her side against Aurora’s entirely and stays there, the faint awareness of a daemon touching his daemon. 

“Fix Dean, then. Or Cas. Protect them from Famine and lock me to the piping in here where I can do no harm.”

“See, sasquatch, I can’t do that. Cassie’s desire for red meat and Dean’s suppressed desires for whatever he’s afraid of admitting to aren’t things I can change. What I can do is suppress the your craving so Famine can’t hurt you.” Gabriel breaks away, shifting his gaze to look at something behind Sam instead of straight into his eyes. The gold in his eyes, if possible, dims a little. “Can’t do it without permission, and you haven’t given me the same blanket permission you gave Castiel.”

“Go ahead, then.” If Gabriel can stop the craving, even for a little bit, if he can stop the hallucinations of Lucifer whispering sweet nothings in his ear and his ridiculous inability to help Dean, Sam will take any pain it takes. And he has no doubt it’ll hurt. Angel stuff always does, and they always underestimate it. Case in point: Cas and the carvings on their ribs. That _hurt_ , and Cas just gave them a don’t-be-a-pansy look. Human ribs were not meant to be carved with surprise Enochian without at least several drinks first. 

Strong drinks.

Like, strong enough to knock Bobby on his ass.

Gabriel returns to the other room and Sam follows along slowly, sitting on the end of his bed while Gabriel paces. Hopefully not worrying about how not to kill Sam while doing whatever he’s planning on doing. Couldn’t he just, maybe, throw Sam into one of his alternate realities for long enough to detox completely and back the clock up to put him right back here? It would suck to be Sam, but maybe he’d be clear of demon blood completely. Archangel rehab. 

“Angel grace,” Gabriel says, standing across the room from Sam. 

“I did figure it was going to involve your mojo,” Sam answers when it becomes pretty clear that Gabriel isn’t going to continue. 

“Angel grace is the energy of creation made physical, the ultimate giver of life.” Gabriel stalks back and forth across the room, Epistola watching from a distance. 

“You’re saying you can burn out the evil. Literally.”

“That is the essence, yes.”

Sam squeezes his eyes shut so Gabriel can archangel out without killing him, debating whether to clap his hands over his ears or not. It won’t do much for him on the whole bursting his eardrums piece, but he might manage a little longer. 

Gabriel’s hands frame the sides of his face, warmer than any human. Cas told them it’s normal, that their grace always burns hot, and Lucifer claims he burns cold instead. It ought to be uncomfortable, with feeling feverish already, instead of comforting. They sit there like that, Sam with his eyes closed and Gabriel’s hands on him, while the next wave of bloodlust ravages him, his mind kept clear by those two points of focus as his body screams defiance.

“Make it stop,” he gasps, and Gabriel’s lips close over his own.

Gabriel kisses like he has an eternity, soft brushes of his lips that leave Sam’s tingling, the barely-there touch of his lips a counterpoint to his immense strength. His hands slip from Sam’s face to support himself on the bed, and Sam’s grateful in that small part of his mind not taken up by _more_ that he doesn’t feel trapped by the archangel. Gabriel nips at his lower lip, and Sam’s eyes snap open in surprise as he gasps and this isn’t Sam’s first time around the block, he knows a thing or two and he’s ready for Gabriel to invade his every sense and wipe everything from his mind. Not just ready, ready and willing, looking forwards to it because Sam has always been about the sheer pleasure of sex and Gabriel’s no reserved and proper angel, he’s a hedonistic pagan god and what he likes, he takes. 

And then he moves back, barely still standing between Sam’s knees, very pointedly not touching while Aurora curls up with Epistola, now a golden wolf. 

“Sorry, kiddo,” he says. “Best way to dose you up with my grace without the bright lights and power surges that scream archangel.”

Sam blinks a few times, eyes locked with Gabriel’s, before that reckless streak of his rears its head again. He wraps his hands around Gabriel’s biceps and the archangel permits him to drag him back on to Sam’s lap, claiming his mouth properly this time. The tingle of Gabriel’s grace is muted this time, a shred of overflowing magic instead of a river, and Sam’s thankful that he works out when he’s frustrated because he doesn’t topple on his ass when he twists them both to press Gabriel down into the mattress. 

“Can’t give you any more grace, sasquatch,” Gabriel gasps in between kisses, tipping his face to the side while Sam works his way down the line of his throat. “Not without tipping Heaven, and more importantly, Mikey and Lucy off. Gave you enough to fight Famine’s effect.”

Sam stops, propping himself up on his elbows to get a good look. Gabriel’s been an enthusiastic participant thus far, and he certainly has the juice to throw Sam off or lock him in an alternate dimension or, say, summon one of his overprotective older brothers, but this isn’t the kind of enthusiastic consent he was hoping for. 

“You think I just want your grace.”

“Best kind of mojo out there.” 

Sam gets up, stalking across the room to pour himself a drink. He raises the glass, eyeing his regular amount, and then shakes his head and pours a Dean-sized portion. He considers raising it to a Bobby-sized drink, but he’s not that humiliated yet. Maybe later, once they’ve de-fanged Famine, he’ll get absolutely stinking drunk and even watch sitcoms with Dean. With a grimace, he downs his drink, reaching for another one. 

Gabriel snaps.

Sam lands in the backseat of the Impala not-quite-so-gracefully, limbs flailing from surprise Air Angel and the various weapons that were scattered around the motel room clattering to the floor on either side of him. In the front, Dean is stretched across the front seat in what is an unmistakably compromising position and clearly distracted enough to not notice Sam’s arrival.

“Sam? Gabriel?” Cas asks, breaking away from Dean to turn around. Dean starts, slamming his head into the roof, and yelps before collapsing back into his seat.

“Just Sam,” he tells Cas to break the awkward silence and also because he thinks Cas might start trying to search the backseat to find where Sam has hidden Gabriel if he doesn’t. 

“Why do I sense copious amounts of Gabriel’s grace from you?”

Sam glances over at Dean, who seems to be slinking down into his coat and hiding in the driver’s seat, and at Machaera sitting next to him completely focused on the big bunch of nothing outside the window. Aurora huffs when he looks to her for her observations, equally as confused as he is. 

“He did an angel mojo thing. Locks down the demon blood in me, and the addiction is what Famine was preying on. If you two can wreck enough of his demons, I can get the ring.” Sam holds up his hands. Where they were shaky before under the influence of demon blood, he’s now completely steady. 

“That much grace ought to have burned you up from the inside out.”

Sam shrugs. “Ask Gabriel. Maybe it’s because I’m Lucifer’s true vessel or whatever?”

“Of course,” Cas lies completely obviously. “I’m certain that’s it.”

Sam picks his things up from the floor, sliding in to harnesses and armoring himself for battle before helping Aurora do the same. Machaera nearly takes his hand off when he bumps her tail to get his knife and Dean jumps like he’s been stabbed with a pin.

“Arm yourselves, both of you. We’ve got a Horseman to maim.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope this makes up for last chapter being sort of lackluster!


	9. Paradise By The Dashboard Light

 

He’s known it for a long time.

Dean doesn’t know when it started, but he realized when Septimana started invading his space. He started off trying to push her away, shake her off so he didn’t have to break etiquette and actually touch her. Then he started ignoring her, letting her sit on his lap or his shoulder or wherever and just not acknowledging her presence.

And then he caught himself watching _Dr. Sexy, MD_ with Machaera as a big furry backrest and Septimana on his lap, petting the black kitten idly while she purrs and purrs and purrs. Cas, on the other side of the motel room, continues pecking away at Sam’s laptop, correcting Wikipedia again. 

He didn’t even seem fazed by what amounts to just about the most intimate touch between two people without any clothes coming off. 

After that, all the things Cas was doing took on a little more meaning. Waking up to find Cas sitting on the edge of his motel bed, watching him sleep. Septimana curled in his lap at mealtimes in the various bars and diners. Machaera wandering away from his side to stand by Cas while he does research. 

The first time Cas reaches down while pencilling in corrections on sticky notes to Dad’s journal and digs his fingers into Machaera’s ruff, Dean jerked with surprise at the feeling of fingers on the back of his neck, stroking touches drifting down his back. Cas pets Machaera absentmindedly, long strokes along her back, and she purrs while he chokes off the sounds threatening to spill forwards. 

Cas is an angel. Cas doesn’t feel that way about him. 

And so he doesn’t go out on Unattached Drifter Christmas. Sam thinks it’s unusual, and yeah, he’s right, but he just can’t bring himself to. Not today. Not when even Machaera’s sluggish, caught up in that empty void inside himself where he wants Cas and Cas doesn’t want him back. Dean’s no stranger to filling the hole in his heart with one-night stands and too much alcohol to be good for anyone, but this time, he can’t even bring himself to do that. 

He just wants. 

Tonight’s a bad night to get drunk. It’s the kind of night where he’ll end up texting things Cas won’t understand but would be embarrassing if anyone else saw them if he gets drunk. 

It doesn’t get better the next day. It gets worse, and exponentially worse when Cas shows up. Yeah, they need his help, but now he has to look at him, to sit squished in tiny booths surrounded by that aura that is one part Cas’ scent and the other part residual angel grace and entirely too intoxicating. 

_“So what’s your poison, Deano? You’d best know what it is that you crave, because sooner than later Famine will make you do anything for it. You’d kill for it. You’d die for it. You’d break everything in that pathetic little moral code of yours for a little more and it still wouldn’t fill that empty hole inside of you.”_

He claimed he didn’t know, but it all made sense then. His greatest desire is not money or power, it’s the safety of those he cares about, and apparently that’s a little too nebulous for Famine. Instead, Famine’s preying on his desire for Cas, and nobody can know that. 

Especially not Cas.

Recon, never his favorite thing in the world, is especially awful when trapped in the car with Cas being awfully human and chatty. Even the nine- _nine_ \- runs they make through various fast food joints doesn’t help and he’s so incredibly sick of the smell of cheap and greasy burgers but he’d kiss it off Cas if he had the option. 

“How many burgers is that?” he tries to distract himself with the fast food, _count the wrappers for God’s sake that’s a lot of wrappers in my baby and he’s not cleaning any of them up_ , because even the torment his baby’s going through isn’t quite enough to distract him from how human Cas is, how endearingly open and warm. It was easy to cool his attraction when Cas was a distant figure popping in and out with threats as often as quiet research, but not when he’s nearly affectionate like this. 

“Lost count. It’s in the low hundreds.”

“Looking good for a guy who ate more than his body weight in fast food in the last day or two.” 

Cas looks down at himself, confused. “I don’t look any different.”

Dean smiles to himself. It’s one of the things he doesn’t like about most angels, the all-knowing crap. He likes that Cas is oblivious about all things human, that for all his knowledge about human history and all sorts of lore, but yet he doesn’t understand _human_. 

And so he catches Cas’ hand and squeezes it, something he could totally pass off as a moment between fellow hunters. And then impulse control takes over and he presses a kiss to the back of Cas’ hand because he’s a frigging hero from a trashy romance and there’s no good way to even blame Famine because Famine can only amplify what’s already there. 

Cas grabs him by the lapels of his jacket and drags him over the seat, smashing their lips together with all force and no finesse. Dean scrabbles to find a place to support himself, one hand finding purchase on the edge of the window and the other sliding along the seat and resting just under Cas’ thigh. Even still, there’s almost no weight on his wrists. He forgets, sometimes, that Cas is preternaturally strong. 

“Tell me you want this,” Cas growls, way deeper than his usual tones. “Because I brought the kielbasa tonight.”

Dean pulls back a little, blinking at him. “Cas. Are you paraphrasing lines from Casa Erotica 13?”

Cas tips his head to the side, thinking hard about it. “I don’t know. I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to the titles. Gabriel gave me an assortment of videos to watch about proper human interactions.”

Well, compared to Gabriel, Dean feels like he’s winning Big Brother of the Year. Big Brother of the Century. He may have helped teach Sam how to kill things, hustle pool, and pick up floozies in bars but at least he didn’t teach Sam the tenets of basic human interactions from pornos. Which, now that he thinks about it…

“Wait. Doesn’t Casa Erotica 13 have your brother in the starring role?”

“He says it is one of his finest works. The Gospel of Gabriel.” 

Dean stares at Cas. Cas stares at Dean.

He’s completely serious.

“I can’t believe you learned human interaction from a cheesy porno starring your own brother. Cas, you do know that porn is…” Dean winces before he continues, unable to believe he actually has to say this. “You do know porn is an unrealistic version of human… interaction… and only the sexual part?”

Cas blushes. “Of- Of course I do!”

This is so incredibly corny, and Dean may or may not have watched a few too many pornos himself in long nights in lonely motel rooms, but he finds himself leaning in a hair’s breadth away from Cas’ lips and whispering. 

“Would you like me to teach you?”

“Please,” Cas whispers back, angling his face just so slightly upwards but not closing the distance completely. 

Machaera and Septimana curl up together in the backseat, Machaera’s purring humming alongside under the thrum of the radio, and Dean takes reassurance from that before he presses his lips to Cas’ own, pulling back to brush barely-there kisses against him until Cas’ lips part under his. He smiles against them, then laps at the seam of his lips, asking, not taking. 

Cas makes a little pleased sound and licks at Dean in turn, then bites. He jerks back, apologies bubbling up on his lips, and Dean grins and bites him back. The apologies are cut off in a gasp of pleasure, almost immediately becoming a drawn-out moan as Dean _finally_ takes possession of Cas’ mouth. 

“Castiel,” he purrs, drawing out the last syllable and proceeding to try and get Cas to make more of those delightful sounds. 

“Dean,” Cas groans, panting for breath he doesn’t need. “More.”

“Yes,” he groans, trying to move closer to Cas without hurting himself. The Impala was not designed for front-seat trysts. 

Moving, as it turns out, comes with its own realizations. Namely, that he’s incredibly hard in his jeans, painfully hard, and that the drag of his hips along the seat is agonizingly arousing. He hisses out a sharp breath, rolling his hips against the seat, and Cas whines deep in his throat. 

“Dean,” he begs, and Dean throws himself back into messy kisses and he prides himself on his skill, on taking his lovers apart until they writhe beneath him and yet here he is, making out with Cas like a horny teenager only intent on more, more, more. There are whimpers and gasps and the whole litany of beautiful non-words that punctuate good sex mixed with cries to Cas and silent prayers to Castiel, Angel of the Lord, to never stop and things in Enochian that sometimes bear the harsh intonations of curses and sometimes the lyrical music of angelic joy. 

“Wish we had more room. Wish we weren’t supposed to be staking out a bar and instead were somewhere private. Cas, want you so bad.”

Cas makes a little choked sound and Dean suddenly wants him to make that sound as much as possible, but only at his hands. 

He marks off the thump in the backseat as Machaera daydreaming and falling off, but then Cas moves to look behind them, pulling his lips away. 

“Sam? Gabriel?”

Dean jerks back and his head connects with the Impala’s roof, pain shattering through his nerve endings for a split second before he collapses back into the driver’s seat, nursing his pains and completely and utterly embarrassed. He misses Sam’s response as the flush creeps up his cheeks and he stares out the window with his back to his brother, and he’s not upset to be caught with Cas, it’s just the whole getting caught making out in the car by his little brother. When he’s supposed to be doing recon, though in his defense he didn’t sign up for that. It shouldn’t count as shirking his duties if he was sort of dropped into them by an archangel who saw no need to explain anything. 

“Arm yourselves, both of you. We’ve got a Horseman to maim.”

Dean’s missed most of the conversation, too caught up in his own mental drama and honestly, Cas seems to be doing quite fine carrying on a conversation despite- Dean peeks out of the corner of his eye and yep, that’s an erection. 

Good to see that he’s not the only one still affected. 

“Dean, you go through the back with Ruby’s knife. I have enough grace to cause quite a bit of damage from the front. Sam, follow me in and do not bother covering your eyes.”

“What?” Dean and Sam chorus, then look at each other irritably. 

“I’m going to, as you put it, go nuclear.”

“You’ll kill Sam. Sammy, you come in through back with me, and Cas, you have ten minutes before we’re coming in.” Stupid-ass plan for Cas to come up with, expecting Sammy to stand by as he goes nuclear. 

“Dean, you don’t understand. Sam is… I suppose you could say Sam is shining brighter even than many of my brethren right now. It is hard to tell, but I believe Gabriel may have imparted more of his grace to Sam than I had, even before I left Heaven.” Cas gives Sam the look that means he’s staring into his soul, quite literally, and seems satisfied. “So don’t bother covering your eyes. That much of Gabriel’s grace will protect you from mine.”

Sam smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Then let’s go.”


	10. Piece Of The Action

 

The paintings really don’t do them justice.

Sam doesn’t realize it until he follows Cas around to the back, but he can see a humming, almost like a heat haze deep inside Cas’ chest. When Cas does the whole palm on the face, burn the demons from the inside out with the holy wrath of Heaven thing, Sam can see the humming intensify inside him and threads of golden grace wind through his veins until he pours it into their head. He can see the demon writhe inside the host, holy fire leaping along every fiber of their being, until they and their vessel collapse. 

And when Cas prepares to go nuclear? Well, that’s when he’s damn glad Cas took care of all the demons nearby already because all he can do is stare. Cas’ wings are on a different plane and so he can’t see them, as such, but he can see the moment his grace threads through every feather, making his wings visible as a sketch in golden ink superimposed on reality.

For the first time, Sam doesn’t see Cas, the mostly-angel who likes cheeseburgers and bees and thinks God ought to be pleased by milkshakes, who alternates between coldly powerful and watching sitcoms with Dean and questioning why everyone is so concerned that the baby looks like the milkman and has a daemon who prefers being a kitten. No, he sees Castiel, Angel of the Lord, in all his glory and power while Septimana loses corporeal form, becoming pure grace in the shape of a kitten with wings. 

Castiel’s true voice rings out around them, hurting his ears but not bad enough to seriously damage him, and then he and Septimana explode in light and he hears demons screaming before they collapse into their corporeal forms again, unconscious. 

And Sam steps into the diner to face Famine, the one demon not affected by Dean’s stabbing spree out back or Castiel’s grace-bomb. 

“Winchester,” Famine wheezes, and with every step Sam takes towards him he can feel the battle inside him intensifying, Famine and the demon blood trying to make him succumb and Gabriel’s grace holding them at bay. It hurts, the demon blood eating away inside him and angel grace burning it back, and he slogs through the next step and the one after that and slams a knife from his belt through Famine’s hand.

Famine laughs, wheezing into chuckles and choking before he laughs again, and then he finally screams as Sam takes another knife to his finger. It’s anticlimactic, almost, the Horseman collapsing and then vanishing, and Sam takes a moment to hope that Dean can haul them both back to the Impala before he and Aurora collapse.

 

***

 

He wakes in a room in a proper hotel, not the piece of crap motels he and Dean usually stay at, Aurora stretched in her favored spot at the foot of the bed. Epistola is a caramel-colored hawk perched on the headboard, staring down at him, and he’s not sure how he knows it’s Epistola except he does for sure. 

Gabriel is nowhere to be seen, and Sam guesses that when you’re one of the most powerful beings in the universe, the limits on how far you can be from your daemon are probably a lot looser. 

He gets up and wanders, Epistola soaring on quiet wings  behind him while Aurora does a little exploring of her own. They’re in a massive suite on what, when he wanders out on to the wraparound balcony, is the top floor of not a tall building but an opulent one. There’s the room he woke up in, king-sized bed nicer than anything he’s slept on before and plush carpeting that makes him want to walk barefoot instead of always keeping his boots on, with an en-suite bathroom all in marble and chrome and shit, glass-walled shower and a massive bathtub with jets. The balcony winds from the French doors in his bedroom to another set in what must be the living room and to another in the other bedroom, wardings in what he recognizes as Dean’s sloppy Enochian drawn on the glass panes that weren’t on his own. 

Back inside, the living room is exactly as opulent as he’d imagine, with wide couches and a huge television, a full kitchen that is stocked with absolutely no food, and a tile entryway to a locked and warded door. The door leading to the warded room has several oversized neon pink sticky notes on it.

_Deano and Cassie’s Room: Really wouldn’t suggest going in_ reads the first one in cursive that’s reminiscent of the curves of properly-written Enochian. 

_Oh, and if you hear banging, they’re either having fun or fighting._

_I may or may not have locked them in there._

_Locks are Deano-proof, I’d like to see him try to break them and they’re warded to melt his lockpicks._

_Also may have warded the room to keep little brother inside._

_Stropha says to tell you that they needed to talk about their feelings since the sexual tension was off the charts, I mean Freyja would have shuddered._

_Pray for your breakfast, sasquatch!_

The last one, the sole note on a neon green sticky note, is signed with an anatomically correct doodle of a human heart and signed with the Enochian glyph he has to assume means Gabriel. At closer inspection, the door has Enochian painted all over it in the matte version of the glossy white of the door, barely visible but visible enough to be effective. 

“Clever,” he tells Epistola, who preens and lands on his shoulder. Sam shivers at the taboo, but it isn’t the worst thing Gabriel’s done by far and she is being very careful not to dig her talons in.

“My idea. Gabriel doesn’t like subtlety.”

“Trust me, I know.”

Epistola’s eyes glitter with amusement and she lapses back into a calm silence that he’d never get around Gabriel. Daemons aren’t a mirror, they’re an extension of a person. Epistola seems to be everything quiet and calm about Gabriel, the seriousness of an archangel, protectors of, well, everything. 

Aurora’s his conscience, and good things rarely happen when he ignores her. She’s mostly quiet since Ruby, since the demon blood. Demon possession leaves daemons listless, almost like they’re severed, and he drank so much of it that she’s never been quite the same. She’s active, sure enough, but quiet. Doesn’t even talk to Machaera, most days.

That’s the most painful reminder of what he did. He’s not sure Aurora will ever recover from the damage demon blood did to their bond.

She pads over to him, summoned by his distress, and he scratches the sensitive spot on her throat while Epistola hops off, shifting to a monkey for long enough to manipulate the TV remote and turn on cartoons before becoming a fox. She picks up another sticky note from the couch, carrying it over and sticking it right-side-up to Sam’s forearm. And another. And another.

_The couch is warded to eat fur, so if it burps, Aurora’s shedding. Haven’t figured out how that spell went wrong, yet. Kinda like it. Leave the remote anywhere near the couch and you’ll end up watching CSPAN, anywhere near Stropha and it’ll be Scooby Doo. She makes the channel play it all day, every day._

_P.S.- Don’t tell Deano. Can’t wait to see the couch freak him out._

_P.P.S.- The couch’s name is Horatio and no, he doesn’t like Shakespeare. If he eats anything of yours, he accepts trades of paperback mystery novels and popcorn, though he likes his popcorn with Parmesan cheese and salt, no butter._

Sam laughs, crumpling the notes up, and tosses them towards the table to deal with later. Epistola turns into a miniature dragon, incinerating them mid-arc into ashes that drift away and disappear. 

“I didn’t know daemons could turn into dragons.”

Epistola gives him an incredulous look. “I predate the entire universe and everything in it, though not by much. I can be anything I want to.” Just to prove it, she stretches her wings wide and, just as fast as her other transformations, and a beautiful blonde in archaic clothing sits on the couch next to him.

Aurora puts herself between the two of them, seeing the opportunity for even more petting hands, and offers Sam her belly. Epistola obliges when Aurora puts her head in Epistola’s lap, scratching under her chin. It’s weird, seeing a person touch Aurora but feeling nothing the way he does when other daemons touch her.

“Sigyn, in this form. Odin insisted that Loki take a wife to get him away from the Jotun Angerboda and Gabriel couldn’t risk another pagan god getting close enough to see the angel underneath. With a little bending of reality, he tamed a fox to play Stropha and gave me a little garter snake that always stayed in my sleeve.” She checks her sleeve, sighing sadly, and then shifts back into a fox and pays rapt attention to Dracula chasing Shaggy and Scooby. 

The vampire is fake, and so is the Miner Forty-Niner and the Black Knight, and as the Snow Ghost makes its first appearance Sam finally decides he’s hungry enough to pray to Gabriel, weird as that sounds. 

“Oh high and mighty Archangel Gabriel, any way I could get a burger in here and maybe a cold beer? Some fries wouldn’t go amiss, either.” 

There’s a shift of wings and Gabriel appears on the tiled entryway, absentmindedly tracing a ward in blood without ever seeming to cut his finger on the front door. It flares gold, brighter than when Cas does the same things, and he seems satisfied and tosses a bag of fast food at Sam. It hangs in the air longer than should be physically possible and lands gently, barely crumpling the bag. 

“Where are we?” Sam asks. He has no idea how long he was out for, so the fact that it’s late afternoon means very little. 

“Home,” Gabriel offers quietly, and Sam has the urge to take a closer look at all the shelves and knickknacks, to see what Gabriel’s collected over the years and found valuable enough to keep in his private sanctuary. The only thing that makes him reach into the bag and unwrap his burger instead- he didn’t see a microwave in the kitchen, but angel mojo makes the need for one kind of negligible- is not wanting to betray Gabriel’s trust, not after the vulnerability that flickers over the archangel’s face when he admits where they are.

“Where is home?” he asks. “Have to admit, I’m pretty curious as to what part of the world could appeal to an archangel on the run enough to make it his home.”

Gabriel crosses the room with mortal slowness, and Sam doesn’t comment on how exhausted he looks as Epistola flutters out to the balcony to keep watch and Gabriel collapses into the couch. He stares at the television for long moments, watching the Mystery Machine rumble down a lonely road and Scooby steal the insides straight out of Shaggy’s sandwich. 

Sam’s seen Cas do this, go completely still and unresponsive, reminding them that he only blinks and breathes and eats and all of those other little human things because it makes them more comfortable. Gabriel, even when he’s shamming at being someone else, is always a flurry of motion even in stillness. It’s always the facial expressions and the wild hands and the candy and the illusory balancing act and, Sam now realizes, the subsonic hum of his grace that is now muted. It’s unnatural, not seeing the person go angel still but seeing _Gabriel_ go that still.

“Shores of Lake Superior. We’re out in the middle of nowhere.” Gabriel pauses, not looking at Sam, and he’s quiet when he continues. “The other floors are storage. I like living up higher, where I can be closer to the sky, even though I don’t dare fly much anymore. Stropha flies, and I live the wind beneath my wings through her.”

Aurora joins Epistola out on the balcony, leaving him as alone with Gabriel as he’s ever going to get, and he observes without staring. Usually, that’s reserved for not alerting targets, but this time it’s to avoid spooking the angel. Gabriel’s clothes hang a little too large and he has dark circles under his eyes. The hum of his grace, nigh on imperceptible most days, is absent entirely and when Sam clings to the last vestiges of the grace Gabriel imparted to him, he can see that Gabriel is weaker even than Cas right now. 

Which is why he brought them to his home. There’s magic layered on magic here, and an angel in hiding is no doubt carefully enough to take every precaution Sam’s ever thought of and then some. It would be the best place for him to retreat to when he’s weakened and Cas is, too. Cas spent all of his grace going nuclear and, as he’s told them regularly, grace does not recover immediately for an angel separated from Heaven’s reserves. 

He hates seeing Gabriel like this, he decides. 

“Famine’s gone.”

“Yes, he is,” Gabriel agrees, giving him a puzzled look that means he’s far too tired to go poking around Sam’s mind to find his answers.

Sam doesn’t take a deep breath. He’s too well-trained to fall in to predictable tells like that. Instead, he just reaches for the remote, flicking it onto the couch as he continues turning, ending up on his knees straddling Gabriel’s hips. 

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Gabriel says, trying for his usual snark, “I’m not a female demon.”

Sam ignores him. He knows scared and defensive when he sees it, and Gabriel is one step shy of a cornered beast without one piece of the whole all powerful and immortal bit. 

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” he answers, “I’ve moved on from that type.”

Gabriel doesn’t respond and neither does he move, which Sam takes as neither a good sign nor a bad sign. 

“Take back your grace, Gabriel. You look awful.”

“You really know how to woo an angel, Sammykins.”

Sam leans down, resting his forehead against Gabriel’s, and just breathes. Gabriel eventually starts breathing again, shallow breaths that slowly match Sam’s even rhythm, and Horatio the Couch finally claims the remote and switches the channel to CSPAN, replacing the bright sounds of Scooby Doo with the drone of voices. 

When he closes that last inch and kisses Gabriel, it is one of the most chaste kisses since he was a teenager and yet full of promise. He learns the texture of Gabriel’s lips without the tingle of his shared grace until he finally sits back to breathe.

“You can’t give my grace back that way. It will burn itself out, eventually, but for now you’re protected.” Gabriel closes his eyes, seemingly satisfied with that, and goes boneless against the couch. “I’m tired, Sam.”

“Sleep, then.” Sam moves back to his side of the couch, rescuing the remote from Horatio, and finds some mindless comedy to watch. Aurora joins him, curled up in a just-right dog bed on the lowest shelf of one of the built-ins, and Epistola shifts to what might be a kitten or some other small form to tuck into the space at Aurora’s belly. 

When the people in the romcom are having their massive misunderstanding and accompanying montage of miserable days, Gabriel slides down and sprawls into Sam’s lap as he finishes his fries, which are magically still warm. He finishes the movie with a snoring archangel in his lap, and that more than anything else is a confirmation of how tired Gabriel actually is. 

Angels don’t sleep unless they’re absolutely drained. Cas told them that ages ago. 

It is a slow, quiet day with Gabriel asleep on his lap and enough noise from the other room to prove that they’re still alive in there and not fighting to get out. Aurora, though she usually doesn’t sit still for this long, stays cradling Epistola while Sam watches movie after movie. He doesn’t get hungry, even when he thinks he ought to be hungry again, and he can only attribute that to his lazy day and the angel grace inside him. Eventually, he carries Gabriel to the bedroom he woke up in, leaving Aurora to guard Epistola while he tucks in the archangel. 

Aurora will tell him if anything changes, he thinks as he steps into the archangel’s shower, and there’s probably nowhere safer for him to let down his guard right now.

 


	11. A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

 

Like everything else here, the shower is an absolute luxury in every sense of the word.

 It’s the little details that definitely rank this shower in his top ten, probably in his top five.  Motels don’t have this kind of water pressure, and Bobby’s place sure as hell doesn’t. And he doesn’t even have to stoop. The entire place has high ceilings, and the shower head is set well above him, which might be the best thing he’s ever seen. 

He stands there for the longest time under the water, just letting it pound warmth against him and ease, well, everything. The filth from slicing Famine’s finger off melts away, taking with it some of the guilt about the resurgence of his addiction because it was absolutely Famine’s fault and not his own. The tension from a hunt that didn’t go quite right, no matter how successfully it ended after all. It all slides away, and he finds his center again, because that’s what he’s always like to do after a hunt. Deal with the monster, then let all the guilt about what he’s done and all the horror that he’s seen wash down the drain. 

When he finally leaves, it is to feeling much better than before, and he slides into a pair of Gabriel’s sweatpants and grabs a blanket out of the same closet before checking the wards he recognizes and crashing on the couch.

 

***

 

_Warm._

Sam hasn’t woken feeling quite this warm, this protected- _overprotected,_ his mind supplies- since Aurora settled. She used to take large forms and sleep curled around his back in the sketchy motel rooms while Dad was out hunting late. They both did, Machaera and Aurora, and it says so much about the stability that Dean had and lost that Machaera settled that way. 

He reaches over his shoulder, half-expecting that Dean set Machaera to guard him after such a scare with the demon blood, and digs his fingers into feathers instead.

_Feathers?_

Sam twists, rolling over to find some sort of explanation, and he doesn’t fall off the couch. He blinks a few times, because he’s sure he fell asleep on the couch but maybe that whole interaction with Gabriel and Epistola was a dream because he’s on the bed he thought he woke up in and seriously? A couch that eats mystery novels and likes CSPAN? What the hell will his sleeping mind come up with next?

_Shhh,_ a voice mumbles in his head, trailing off into silence again. _Name’s…. Horatio. Gonna be…… offended._

Sam finally looks, and why is he in bed with Gabriel?

The feathers tucks around his bare back, tugging him closer with not much pressure and a nudge at his mind, and Gabriel murmurs something incomprehensible in Enochian. Sam stirs, waking up a little more now, and Gabriel’s wing- because it has to be his wing, that’s the only thing that makes sense despite the fact that it doesn’t make sense at all- tightens and one hand drifts up to touch his forehead and Gabriel mumbles something that may be _sleep_ and may be just about any other word beginning with s and then he’s falling.

The next time Sam wakes up, it’s to the breath Gabriel doesn’t need huffing between his shoulder blades, more slowly than would be safe for any human. Gabriel runs hot, making Sam grateful for the thin slide of the sheets rather than a heavy duvet, but it isn’t the burning heat of a fire or the stifling humidity of summer days when Dean hasn’t gotten around to fixing the Impala’s AC. No, Gabriel’s heat is the heat of the sun in the early winter, when Sam’s breath fogs in the air and yet the sun denies the cold, the type of warmth that is not overwhelming but hints at the cold yet to come. 

Sam reaches up, running his fingers along the delicate bone of Gabriel’s wing, so breakable and yet already starting to thrum with the power of his grace. Gabriel’s wing is at the same time the most vulnerable and yet the most powerful part of him, and Sam traces the length of a the first long feather he can reach, straightening it in line with the others before retreating to the smaller feathers guarding the bone. 

Gabriel hums in his sleep and presses closer, and Sam finally wakes up enough to ask one major question: how the hell can he see Gabriel’s wings? Cas gave them the whole lecture about multidimensional wavelengths of celestial intent and that their wings, like their grace, exist on a plane imperceptible to humans. Cas’ trick with the shadows is the closest they can come to visualizing angel wings and even forcing them to manifest on the physical plane like that, he says, is immensely draining.

Gabriel grumbles against his back, pushing his wing further into Sam’s hand, and almost purrs when he drags along the fall of Gabriel’s feathers, as far down his primaries as he can reach without moving. The archangel mouths something halfway between a kiss and a bite into the ridge of Sam’s spine, lapping over the indentations of his teeth as the lassitude vanishes from his limbs and he returns to the waking world.

Gabriel groans incoherently, vibrations rumbling in Sam’s chest and reminding him of the ringing sharpness of an angel’s true voice, and Sam feels the faint flutter of his eyelashes against his skin. The tightening of Gabriel’s grip on his waist, the grip that was keeping him tethered here to the archangel- _like you’d ever want to leave, Sam Winchester,_ he reminds himself, _not when an archangel clings to you in his sleep_ \- is his only warning before Gabriel drags him to the center of the bed and flips himself on top, wings cradling down so that Sam’s fingers stay buried in Gabriel’s primaries. 

“How?” he demands, eyes burning with more than a hint of gold, every inch the otherworldly creature and Sam can’t drag his eyes away from Gabriel’s own no matter how much he wants to get a good look at his wings. “You can touch them, you can see them. How?”

Sam doesn’t reply, preferring to take a long look and admire what might be his only chance to see an unguarded Gabriel, the angel without any of the affectations of the pagan god. Most notable is the hum of his grace, the undeniable thrum of power stretched along his wings. 

His wings. Sam remembers reading that the archangels have six wings, but so much of the popular representations show them with two, so that’s what he imagined. So much of the lore is full of holes, after all. Cas has only proven that time and time again. 

Gabriel’s wings spread behind him, the closest pair curled around his shoulders to cage Sam in and the other two flaring out, curving enough to keep from knocking things off the shelves. The smallest feathers, the ones shielding the bones, are a deep brown. It’s fascinating, Sam decides, to look at the variegation from deep brown to burnished gold, the nearly seamless transition from shade to shade that shifts and moves as the morning light plays over them. They’re beautiful.

Gabriel flushes red, clearly eavesdropping. 

Sam permits himself a small smile and doesn’t stop. Knowing that Gabriel is eavesdropping on his every thought right now adds a thrill to it and Sam thinks things he’d never manage to say aloud. 

Like how the morning light creeps over his cheekbones and highlights the contours of his face, bringing out the gold in his eyes and showcasing the terrifying creature of legend, the archangel who could kill him as soon as look at him and bring him back to do it all over again in increasingly inventive ways. Like that memories of watching him sleep, features going soft and the years-no, the centuries- of stress easing from his face. 

Even now, Gabriel’s lacking the sharp edges that Sam’s come to associate with the renegade archangel, the haze of sleep still clinging to him and the confusion that he doesn’t think many people ever get to see from an angel, let alone one of the oldest four. It’s endearingly… human, and the dichotomy of ancient angel and the man who fell asleep on the couch last night. 

Sam meets Gabriel’s gaze, willing him to read the sincerity in his eyes, and thinks about how that piece of him that wants reckless and wild is drawn to the power Gabriel’s displayed on several occasions- the Mystery Spot, TV Land, protecting Sam from Famine- and yet he so enjoyed last night, watching romcoms while Gabriel sprawled across the couch next to him. 

“You—“ Gabriel’s voice breaks and he clears his throat, irritation crossing his face briefly. “You don’t want me for my grace?”

Sam tugs the archangel down to his chest, well aware that he only can because Gabriel permits it. “For someone so old, you’re kind of an idiot. Do you know how much simpler my life would be if you weren’t an all-powerful archangel with an equally powerful brother intent on wearing me to the prom?”

They stay there quietly for a while, Gabriel concentrating and tucking his wings deliberately into another plane, until Sam’s stomach rumbles. 

“You humans,” Gabriel sighs. “So high maintenance.”

“Speaking of,” Sam thinks of, suddenly embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of it sooner, “how are Dean and Cas eating?”

 

***

 

“At least you can get out of here,” Dean grumbles. Angels. Dicks with wings, every one of them. Except Cas, of course, though he’s pressing the dick with wings card right now. 

“The wards only permit me to return to this room, Dean, and they only permit me to leave for long enough to fetch food and return. We’ve been through this.” Cas is inspecting the pancakes suspiciously, turning each one over to check for ninja stars or something, with Septimana tipping her head upside down to help him. 

“Then break the damn wards!”

Cas doesn’t answer. Again. They’ve been having this argument on repeat the entire time Gabriel’s kept them on lockdown with only a sticky note on the wall that says:

_Play nice and I’ll let you out. Eventually. Hugs and kisses, Gabriel_

Dean found a stick of wax and warded everything he could without actually keeping Cas locked out. He wouldn’t put it past Gabriel to let him starve to death if he locks Cas out. Not that they’ll last forever. Cas’ grace is dwindling and he says it won’t be too long before he’s good for little else but healing bruises. 

“Dean.” Cas stands at the warded window-door-thingy, staring out across the lake and the storm brewing there. He’s been uncommonly quiet, even for Cas, ever since Gabriel zapped them all here. Wherever here is.

When Dean and Machaera fought their way into the diner, Famine was in a fetal position on the floor with Sam and Aurora collapsed not far from him. Outside the diner window, Cas and Septimana were unconscious on the ground and all he could think was _hell, he was going to have to carry them all to the Impala_. 

That’s when Gabriel showed up, told him to go to Cas, and zapped Sam away, then returned and zapped him and Cas and both their daemons into this room. 

Asshole.

“What is it, Cas? You see something?” Dean joins him looking over the lake, and by the size of it he has to guess he’s somewhere along the Great Lakes. They’re the only lakes he’s seen this big and it just doesn’t look like the ocean. Which cuts out a lot of the US, but still doesn’t really narrow it down that much. 

He wonders if there are nautical ghosts out there, haunting the shoals where ships have wrecked. That would be an interesting hunt. 

“Dean,” Cas repeats, quiet and almost… afraid? “Dean, was it just Famine?”

Dean stares out the window, processing Cas’ words in his head, and then whirls on the angel when he makes to leave. “No, Cas,” he whispers, unable to make the words come louder because they don’t talk about things like feelings, Dad never let them. Feelings are for people who don’t hunt because a moment’s hesitation, a moment’s confusion, can cost people their lives. 

Cas has no such reservations. Angels are creatures of creation, created to love God and God’s creations. They are not creatures of passion the way demons are, indulging in their every whim. Well, Gabriel is and Cas says Lucifer was much the same, once, but he’s talking about angels, not the damn arch-asshats. Angels are the balance to demons, and they possess all of the gentler emotions demons lack with the same depth of passion. 

Cas’ longing is written across his face, an excess of emotion where he used to be so blank, and Dean relishes each moment of emotion he drags out of the angel. It’s just upsetting, knowing that he sees it that much more often as Cas’ grace fades and he falls with agonizing slowness.

“It wasn’t just Famine,” Dean mumbles, and Machaera gives him a disgusted look at his inability to just make Cas understand already and stalks into the bathroom, calling for Septimana to come turn on the water so she can wash the stupid out of her fur.

Cas stands there unresponsive, and Dean sits against the headboard of the bed they’ve been sharing, just not at the same time. He sleeps a certain set of hours with Cas keeping watch and then Cas naps as needed while Dean keeps watch. 

“Come here, Cas.” 

Cas makes to sit next to him and Dean grabs him by the arm, turning him to sit on Dean’s knees. He cradles Cas’ face between his hands and looks, meeting blue eyes stare for stare. 

“It wasn’t just Famine,” he whispers again, keeping his eyes fixed on Cas’. “It was you, Cas. Everything I said is still true. I want you, Cas, and I’m scared out of my wits to admit it.”

“I don’t understand.”

Dean tugs him closer, just a bit, and tilts his face up towards Cas. “Kiss me, Cas. Kiss me and I’ll show you that it wasn’t just Famine. It was you. It was always you.”

Cas dips down, sweeping his lips across Dean’s the same way he showed him in the car, and this time Dean doesn’t let him tease for long before he deepens the kiss, winding fingers into Cas’ hair and his other hand behind Cas’ neck. Cas clings to his shoulders, getting up in Dean’s personal space and yet all the same not close enough. 

Dean hitches his hips up to make contact with Cas’ and tries to grind their hips together despite the awkward angle. Cas hisses out a breath and drops down into his lap, searching for that friction again with awkward limbs and graceless movements and eventually they find the right fit against and Dean groans, all of a sudden in a hurry to get in Cas’ pants _absolutely right now_. 

The minute he gets his hand down Cas’ pants and _for the sake of all that is holy, Cas doesn’t wear underwear_ and that might be the best thing that has happened in years. Cas moans, the filthiest sound he’s ever heard from his angel, bucking against Dean’s hand, sitting up for the angle and rubbing his ass against Dean’s crotch and he feels like a damn teenager but he doesn’t really care. 

And then the door clicks open.

“See, sasquatch?” Gabriel crows from the other side. “Told you it would open once they were getting along.”


	12. It's All Coming Back To Me Now

 

Sam’s not sure he’s ever seen Dean so red.

“Your interruption is undesired,” Cas tells Gabriel flatly, completely blasé about being caught sitting on Dean’s lap with Dean’s hand down his pants.

“Yeah,” Dean snaps back, “fuck off, asshole.”

Gabriel laughs again and heads for the balcony, leaning against the railing and staring out across the water. Epistola, back to being a miniature dragon, is riding on Aurora’s back with her head on top of Aurora’s. 

“Go on,” Aurora bumps him towards the balcony, making Epistola squeak and hold on tighter. “Epistola can shut the door.”

“It’s weird hearing you call me that,” Epistola complains. 

“Go shut the door. I don’t need to be scarred for life.”

“And you’re going to sacrifice me?”

Aurora shakes, sending Epistola into the air to avoid losing her balance. “You’re the one who set it to open only when they, and I quote, give in to their carnal needs and hump like bunnies.”

Epistola perches on a higher bookshelf. “Can you blame me? The sexual tension between those two was thick enough to choke on.”

Sam takes that as his cue to leave. Aurora’s livelier than she’s been since… since Ruby, he settles on, and he only has Gabriel to thank for that. He hopes it lasts once Gabriel’s grace finally burns itself out inside him. 

“I don’t know,” Gabriel answers without looking at him.

“Eavesdropping, are we?”

Sam can practically hear the eye roll. “Always.”

Sam sits down a little bit behind Gabriel, leaning on the wall and watching the waves crest across the stony shores of the lake. Down below, he follows the whorls of Gabriel’s almost-garden. Pale stones, some clearly scavenged from the beach and others from around the world in various tints, trace intricate paths through the slope down to the lake. In between the stone paths are wildflowers and arched trellises covered in ivy and roses and a dozen other things, stretching around the building and out of sight. 

“I can’t imagine you gardening. It’s too quiet.”

“Can’t be skydiving and tricks all the time, you know.”

“Well, of course. Sort of loses that edge of danger when you can fly if your parachute fails.” 

Gabriel glance back over his shoulder and makes a face. “And alert Mikey that I’m still around? No thanks.” He turns back to the garden, shoulders curving around as he leans against the wide railing. Wings, Sam thinks. That’s how he’d have to keep his wings balanced. Even with how light the bones are, his wings aren’t exactly small and he has six of them. 

He keeps them tucked away still, and Sam can’t help but think that would make this picture absolutely perfect. Gabriel, reclining against the amazing backdrop of the lake and his half-tamed gardens, with his brown-and-gold wings stretched impossibly wide. 

“It’s my Paradise,” Gabriel offers. “The garden, I mean. People keep looking for the real location of the Garden of Eden, wanting to find a way to be closer to Dad, and yet no humans know that the closest recreation of the Garden is right here.” 

“Except me.”

Gabriel gives him an odd look. “You’re one of the most prolific hunters in the game and Lucy’s Vessel. You aren’t exactly the garden-variety human.”

Yeah, Sam sort of guesses that it’s right. Normal isn’t in his and Dean’s vocabulary. Well, not everyone else’s version of normal. Their version is laundromats and motel rooms, shotgun shells full of rock salt and devil’s traps. They’ve each died and been resurrected, have destroyed ancient artifacts and hidden others where they’ll never be found, and oh, released Satan. 

Normal? Yeah, not really.

“You’re right, though. I was never much for gardening, but you can learn anything with practice. It’s my piece of home and my memorial to Lucy, to what he used to be.”

Sam falls silent. There’s nothing he can say to that. Losing Dean was hard enough, but that was only the pain of having his beloved brother dragged to Hell. Just dragged to Hell. This is probably the only situation which makes that seem insignificant in comparison. Gabriel watched as his beloved brother was dragged to Hell by his other beloved brother under the assumption that one day, they would face each other again in a fight to the death. 

From the other door, there’s a slam against the wall and a long, drawn-out moan dwindling into a series of high-pitched gasps. 

“Soundproofing or a walk along the beach?” Gabriel asks.

“Walk. Definitely walk.”

Gabriel snaps, moving them to the cliffs that flank the beach, Aurora behind him. From the house behind them, there’s an outraged shriek and then Epistola comes flying out. She sizes herself up, still in dragon form, and bathes Gabriel in flame for a solid two minutes.

“Had enough?”

“You’ll get yours, just wait.” She retreats with that look in her eye that means a prank war is coming and Sam’s mildly afraid of what a prank war between the Trickster and his own daemon might mean. 

“I look forward to it,” he calls as she pokes at Aurora, trying to make her stop exploring and go to places Epistola likes instead. 

Sam drops down to a lower ledge, dangling his feet over the edge and just above the water. The first wave washes over them and he jerks back from the cold, then lowers them all the way into the water cautiously, prepared for it. 

“A bit cold, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be a baby,” Gabriel chides. “It’s bracing. Makes you feel alive!”

“Sure, up until I get frostbite.”

“Like I can’t fix that.” Gabriel sits next to him, hand just barely not touching. 

“Playing coy?”

Gabriel snatches his hand into his own lap, turning away, and Sam catches a hint of red high on his cheeks before he lets his wings out, tucking them around his shoulders. He pulls his feet out of the water, gingerly leaning against Gabriel’s back between his wings, and leaves his hand palm-up against the rocks. 

“It’s beautiful here,” he says, half-musing to himself but saying it aloud to make it clear Gabriel’s welcome to listen. “Dad was always so driven to find Azazel, so we never stopped anywhere for long. When we were young, Dad would drop us off at school and spend his day researching and sleeping, then pick us up and leave Dean in charge while he hunted. If he couldn’t do that, we went to Bobby’s.”

He falls silent for a while, watching Aurora turn the tables and chase Epistola, using her practice maximizing her own physical abilities to counter Epistola’s constantly changing forms, tumbling and talking trash and wrestling. 

“We never took breaks,” he continues. “Even if there wasn’t a hunt, we were making silver bullets and filling shells with rock salt and sharpening blades all the time. Dad would take us out to the woods for target practice with knives and guns until we could use everything in his arsenal.” Sam smiles. “In the summer, we’d practice beheading watermelons.”

“Little tiny Sam Winchester, beheading watermelons. Wish I could see that.” Gabriel pretends to consider it for a moment. “Oh, wait. I can.”

Sam elbows him, aiming high to hit him just below the wing joint, and Gabriel yelps. 

“That’s creepy.”

“Fine, _fine_ , I won’t tell you if I go peeking through your past. Happy?” Gabriel reaches behind him, placing his palm in Sam’s. Sam squeezes it, hoping that’s clear that they’re still alright. He’s never sure, with angels. 

“Now,” he continues, “we stop when we can. Catch a concert, see a movie. Sometimes we drive out of our way to go see landmarks and Dean makes stupid faces in all the photos. It’s nice, but it’s never quite so… peaceful.” 

Gabriel folds what Sam thinks of as his outer pair of wings, the ones furthest from his shoulders, around Sam’s arms in a gentle embrace. His feathers are soft, yet retain the stiffness required for flight, and Gabriel’s grace tingles where feathers hit bare skin. It’s quiet and peaceful and a truly grounding moment, which is why Sam’s completely unsurprised when Gabriel draws his wings back in and drags Sam to his feet to skip down to the beach and look for sea glass. Lake glass? No idea.

 

***

 

“Gimme,” Gabriel says later that night, making grabby hands at Sam’s laptop. 

“Snap up some headphones. I’m going to sleep.” He hands it over, figuring that Gabriel’s already cherry picked his password from his head, and steals one of the pillows from the other side. Gabriel isn’t going to sleep, so he damn well doesn’t need them. 

Gabriel doesn’t even glance over, but another one appears in its place, emblazoned with _This Pillow Is Not For Sam_ , just in time for him to flip on to his stomach and set Sam’s laptop up in front of him. A pair of headphones appear, already in his ears and plugged in, and something angry hums along Angel Radio. 

“Mikey and Lucy are absolutely spitting mad,” Gabriel translates. “They’ve completely lost track of you and since Raphael swears he did nothing, they just figured out that I’m still alive.” Gabriel cracks his fingers as another screech comes through, echoed through Sam’s head by the shard of Gabriel’s grace. “Only took them a few millennia.”

“Can you tune them out? Giving me a headache.”

Gabriel’s wings rustle before they settle over Sam like a blanket, and the headache eases immediately. “Best I can do, kiddo. I can only tune out the others because I’m stronger than them. I’d get some shuteye while you can, ‘cause this sounds like Mikey and Lucy are gearing up to a screaming match the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Lucy was locked in the Cage and cut off from the rest of us.”

“Great,” Sam grumbles, and the lull of Gabriel’s typing and the touch of his grace sends him to sleep. 

He’s pretty sure it was mojo-assisted sleep, but hell, if archangels are going to keep him up half the night and not in a good way, maybe he’ll forgive Gabriel and make their forced wakefulness a lot more fun.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sort of a short one, but it was a good breaking point. One more fluffy chapter and then I'll have to be all plotty again but it's just so much fun.
> 
> Hope you liked it!


	13. Let's Be In Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, guys. This is a terribly short one and really late, but a girl I graduated with just passed away in a complete surprise and it put a hitch in my writing. This'll be a slow week because of that and life going a bit nuts, so there's a FYI. Thanks for your patience!

 

Dean cooks, with Cas ‘supervising’. 

Sam’s been through that arrangement before, so he lets Gabriel mojo him up some food while Horatio and Epistola fight over the remote and yes, this is his life now. Apparently. A daemon and an enchanted couch with an attitude fighting to change the channel between eternal reruns of Scooby Doo and CSPAN, one of the four Archangels of the Lord flicking his fingers at the TV every time they manage to change it so that he can watch Comedy Central.

Gabriel has also decided to tune back into Angel Radio fully, making comments about the idiocy of various members of his and Cas’ Heavenly brethren and tempting the occasional remark out of Cas in response. It’s giving Sam a headache, the cacophonous ringing of angel on top of angel that he can hear echoed through Gabriel’s grace. Gabriel, for all of his talking with his hands and inability to stay still, keeps at least two fingers on Sam’s skin at all times and usually an arm around his shoulders. It takes the bite out of the headache, at least, but he can adjust to that. It’s far better than Michael and Lucifer, though at least Gabriel translated some of their choicer insults and eventually they went beyond his hearing entirely. 

Cas calling ‘it’s funnier in Enochian’ becomes a regular occurrence.

Dean took one of Gabriel’s unlimited gold cards and Cas to stock the kitchen with his essentials: Hamburger Helper, a wide assortment of alcohol, box mac ’n cheese, and miscellaneous items that fit into Dean’s shopping habits as ‘Cas wanted it, how could I say no?’. And pie. Plus all the ingredients to make fourteen different types of pie from scratch because Cas is positive that it can’t be that difficult. 

Cas’ cooking is… unconventional, for one, and Dean doesn’t seem inclined to do more than laugh and try the fruits of his labors. 

So far, Gabriel’s kitchen has raspberry pie filling on the ceiling and all over the cabinets, there are half-baked pie crusts sitting on the living room shelves and one balanced on top of the shower head in Cas and Dean’s bathroom, and Gabriel fed the piece of blueberry pie that Cas foisted on him to Horatio. Sam ate his under pain of Cas’ pleading stare and Dean’s warning glare and promptly got a stomachache that Gabriel made him suffer with for a full hour. 

Dean seems perfectly content to eat Cas’ attempts at pie, getting one of the angels to mojo up a cassette player so he can jam to his music. Machaera still slinks around corners, keeping Gabriel in sight when Dean isn’t, but Aurora and Septimana have settled down. Aurora has claimed the bottom shelf as her own spot, often with Epistola either harassing her from above or curled between her paws. Septimana perches happily on Cas’ shoulder, and whenever she abandons ship is Gabriel’s time to put up a shield against whatever flying mess Cas will send their way next.

It’s… positively domestic in a way that Sam and Dean have almost never had. They had Bobby, sure, but Bobby was always more of the put them to sleep with alcohol and microwave pizza type and Dad sure as hell didn’t even do that much. The closest Sam’s ever had was his time with Jess, hiding the truth of his history, and in various motel rooms when Dean did his best. Well, Dean always did his best. When it was Sam and Dean against the world, before Dean discovered first girls and then alcohol. 

Septimana flees the kitchen just before Cas dumps cherry liqueur into his pan of reducing cherries and it flames up. Dean shouts and Cas, startled, stares at it until Gabriel flicks his fingers and removes the fire. Dean comes storming out moments later, stripping off his shirt, and Gabriel’s arm tightens around Sam for a split second.

“How positively naughty of you, Cassie,” Gabriel comments, and Dean’s hand flies to the- well, Sam’d like to call it a hickey, but there’s a few too many darker marks that he’d bet money match Cas’ teeth.

Cas flushes dark red at Gabriel’s knowing look, Septimana running over to where Machaera lies stretched across the door to Dean and Cas’ room and hiding behind her. It isn’t like Dean’s neck hasn’t been on view all day, though he seems to have forgotten about it. 

“Settle down, Deano. I don’t care about Cassie’s,” Gabriel summons a sucker out if midair and waves it around, “oral fixation.”

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“Cassie, am I talking about you sucking on Dean’s neck like a common vampire?”

Cas mumbles something incoherent, trying to salvage his cherries from the singed pan. 

“Louder,” Gabriel commands, and Cas whips around with a betrayed look on his face.

“He’s talking about the handprint, Dean,” he says, then glares at Gabriel for a long moment before retreating further into the kitchen.

Dean looks to Sam, who shrugs. He’s got no idea what the angels are on about. Yeah, Cas left a handprint on Dean when he yanked him out of Hell, but it took a lot of mojo and isn’t really the type of thing that doesn’t leave a mark. They sort of… forget about it, like they do with the rest of their scars. Event survived, marks left, moving on to the next people who need to be saved from the monsters that go bump in the night. 

“Cassie staked a claim. Good thing you went rogue before Michael found out about that. I bet he’s absolutely peachy keen that you dared claim his Sword.”

“Michael has no claim on me,” Dean says, fists clenching, at the same time as Cas answers, “I didn’t know he was the Michael Sword!”

“Wait just a moment,” Sam interrupts, feeling like the one rational person here between Cas’ prickly defensiveness, Dean’s righteous indignation, and Gabriel’s… whatever his motivation is. Fun, Sam guesses. “How could Cas lay a claim if Michael already had one?”

Gabriel beams at him, turning so he’s draped across Sam’s lap with his head tipped back over Sam’s far arm. “Clever, Sammy. Michael and Lucifer’s claims are… custom, I suppose you could say. Michael won’t be happy, but he’s at least likely to ask questions first and smite later. If Cassie’d marked you, he’d be a pile of feathery dust.”

Cas and Dean stalk off, locking themselves in their bedroom with Machaera and Septimana outside to prevent Gabriel from sealing them in again. Gabriel looks offended, then turns his pout on Sam.

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, I understand that you grew up to the utter dickishness that is Michael and Lucifer, but you have your moments. There were better ways to tell Dean that Cas put some sort of hands off sign on him and that Michael’s had one on him since the beginning of time. Say, like not telling him. Or me, for that matter.”

“Aw, come on, Sammy!” Gabriel shifts his shoulders, trying to find a comfortable way to sit and extend his wings before giving up and making himself a popsicle instead. He maintains eye contact with Sam the entire time, lapping around the end and taking long pulls and pointedly leaning against Sam’s crotch.

“See, this is why I call you an awful tease.”

Gabriel twists off his lap, landing on his feet and stalking to their bedroom with a clearly sultry look over his shoulder and a flash of gold and brown wings as he leaves a trail of clothes.

“Could you be more stereotypical?”

Gabriel rises up on to his tiptoes, a pair of pink stiletto heels appearing beneath his soles, and sways on the verge of falling with his outer wings keeping his balance and the other two pairs protecting his nonexistent modesty. 

“Kinky.”

“For you, sasquatch? Always.”


	14. You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth

 

It takes a little coaxing- which is hedging around it, they have an explicit agreement that Gabriel insisted on putting in medical terms and he really should find that a little more off-putting but his life is exceedingly strange- but it takes some coaxing to get Gabriel to put away his wings. They’re glorious and he’s spent a sleepy morning learning that Gabriel’s flight feathers aren’t as sensitive as the little downy ones and that the joint where his wings meet his back is most sensitive between two pairs of wings, but they’re a little unwieldy for what he wants to do. 

“C’mon, Sammy, let’s see what you can do,” Gabriel whines, wriggling against the sheets with his hands clasped around the bars that weren’t on the headboard when they walked in. Gabriel’s a little handsy and a little controlling and Sam’s had enough of his teasing for right now. 

He paces around the edge of the bed, dimming the lights and looking at the contrast of pale skin and paler scars tracing across Gabriel’s body. It takes a lot to leave a scar that an angel can’t heal away like it was never there, but Gabriel’s had this body for centuries. 

“Millennia, actually. Took me centuries to rebuild by grace after creating it from nothing. And no, I won’t lie still while you trace each scar with your tongue and tell you the stories behind them. Not this time, at least.” Gabriel narrows his eyes and pinches Sam’s butt from across the room. 

“Hey! No tricks with your grace!”

“Never promised that!” Gabriel sticks out his tongue and Sam launches into movement, throwing himself on top of Gabriel’s legs and tickling along his ribs. The archangel writhes beneath him, twisting to try and escape his hands but keeping his promise to keep his hands on the headboard, and Sam claims his mouth the minute he relents on the tickling. 

Now, Gabriel gives as good as he gets. They’ve been hot together so far, but always tempered by Gabriel’s immortal patience, that desire to go so incredibly, painfully slowly and wring every sensation out because he has an eternity for it. Sam’s a little- _a lot_ \- less patient, he wants everything and he wants it now and it is to his eternal frustration that Gabriel won’t give it to him. 

So Sam sets the pace. He takes and he demands that Gabriel take in return and he refuses to take no as an answer. Gabriel doesn’t disappoint, and in lieu of his roaming hands he wraps himself around Sam, trying to get as close as he can, and Sam has no doubt that if it weren’t for their deal his wings would be spread across Sam’s back to cover every inch of Sam that Gabriel’s skin can’t reach. 

Gabriel drags his foot along Sam’s leg, the sharp edge of those damn pink stilettos making a reappearance and it’s incredibly hot in a forbidden way. Not that there’s much further to go into forbidden territory when he fully intends to do blasphemous things with an archangel. Gabriel certainly doesn’t believe in forbidden things, not after all the centuries as a pagan god, living exactly the way angels weren’t created to. 

“Gabriel,” he hisses between his teeth, and the angel arches up into Sam. The sweet brush of Gabriel’s cock against his is counterpoised against the point of his heels digging into his thighs and the line between pleasure and pain, always beautifully blurred in Sam’s mind, wavers a little more. 

“Go on, Sammy,” Gabriel tells him, voice rough with lust. “I want to you to drive me crazy ’til I’m begging for it.”

Sam slides down, tracing Gabriel’s navel with his tongue, and then lower. Gabriel hums his contentment, then gasps as Sam turns his full attention to sucking him off. 

“Come on, Sammy, you can do better than tha—“ Gabriel cuts off into a moan, hitching his hips up and arching his back into a smooth curve, as Sam digs his nails into the skin just above his tailbone, leaving a neat crescent of red marks mirrored across his spine. Pleasure and pain. 

What do you do to the angel who has done everything? That’s the difficult thing. Sam’s going with conflicting sensations because that’s what he likes. A hint of teeth, a press of nails, and a grip that leaves bruises that heal as soon as he moves his hands. His nails rake down Gabriel’s back, sweeping from the outside of his shoulders across where his wing joints ought to be and down parallel to his spine at the same time as he swallows around Gabriel and the archangel jerks under his hands, coming down his throat and digging his heels into the small of Sam’s back. 

Sam slides a little further back, watching Gabriel collapse back into the pillows, rewrapping his fingers around the headboard and gazing back at Sam with half-lidded eyes. Sam lifts one foot, unbuckling the ridiculously tiny strap around Gabriel’s ankle, and tossing the shoe away from the bed. It poofs into smoke before ever hitting the floor.

“If you wanted them gone, you only had to say so.”

“You vanished your clothes. You can’t deny me this little bit of undressing you, too.”

Gabriel flexes his toes as Sam releases him from the other shoe. “I’d be lying if I said I minded.”

Sam crawls back up the bed to kiss that soft sated smile off Gabriel’s face, willing to wait for Gabriel to catch up before taking care of himself. He reaches above Gabriel’s head, lifting his fingers one by one from the headboard and working the tension out of his fingers and wrists. The minute he releases Gabriel’s hands, the angel traps Sam’s legs between his own and rolls on top of him, spreading his wings down around the two of them. 

The colors of his wings are darkened without the window’s light glittering off his feathers, but enough light leaks in from the gaps between feathers to make it an ethereal cave around them, a private space all their own in the middle of Gabriel’s sanctuary. Gabriel leans down, wings flattening themselves to the bed again, and kisses him.

“You know what the best part of fucking an archangel is, Sammy?” Gabriel asks when he breaks away, brushing their cheeks together to whisper in his ear. 

“The modesty?”

Gabriel huffs out a laugh. “I was created before Daddy thought of refractory periods.”

Sam’s eyes widen and he looks down. “You’re not-“

“I am.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“If so, you’ll die happy.” Gabriel laughs, tossing his wings back, and proceeds to take Sam to pieces and put him back together again and again and again. 

 

***

 

“You boys are in no place to tell me jack squat about healthy relationships,” Bobby growls as Karen pulls another pie out of the oven, much to what looks like Dean’s fear, and Dean isn’t even afraid of Cas’ concoctions. Machaera had been stalking around, following Karen’s nightingale around in a manner just barely not threatening enough for Vigilia to snap at her. 

Epistola is managing to remain a fox, though she forgets to respond to anything but the name Stropha. She perches on a chair next to Gabriel, front paws up on the table while he puts pie away almost as fast as Karen can make it. He intended to drop them off at Bobby’s and leave, since Cas is lacking the juice to take people with him any longer, but Gabriel has a sweet tooth and the entire kitchen is full of pie. 

She bakes all day and all night. Gabriel’s sort of gig, perpetual pie delivery. 

“We just think you’re being a little hasty, that’s all,” Sam mediates before Dean can snap something when still in Karen’s earshot. Aurora pads over, nipping Dean’s calf with an irritated look at Sam that clearly reads _I love you, Sam, but I’m a wolf not an ankle-biter_.

“Hasty?” Bobby picks up the nearest coaster- and since when did Bobby have coasters?- and shakes it threateningly. “Hasty? My wife is alive against all odds and you think I’m being hasty? I tested her, you…”

Sam waits while Bobby struggles with words, Aurora returning to his side, and Karen steps outside to take one of Bobby’s cars to the store.

“You bloody idjits!” Bobby turns red from the effort of not yelling at them earlier. “Silver, holy water, salt, the whole damn dog-and-pony show. She doesn’t remember a thing about the demon or me killing her or any of that mess. She’s back, and you aren’t hunting her because there’s _nothing to hunt_.”

Gabriel and Epistola vanish with a snap.

Dean and Sam exchange a look, and Sam resigns himself to a night spent driving around in the Impala hoping to lure his angel out of hiding while Dean tries to convince Bobby that this isn’t right, that supernatural things like this are never benign. He isn’t sure who is getting the short end of the stick.

 

***

 

Bobby shoots Karen himself, and it breaks his heart.

They give her a hunter’s funeral, Sam and Dean at either shoulder with Machaera and Aurora pressed up against Vigilia’s sides. They gathered the dust that became of Karen’s nightingale and laid it on her chest, keeping them together even in death as the flames claim her body. 

Sam doesn’t see anything, but he feels the faintest brush of feathers against his back. 

 

 


	15. Heaven Can Wait

 

Roy and Walt believe in overkill, and Sam has to watch Aurora’s fur splatter with golden ichor. She staggers sideways, one leg collapsing under her, holding on to life by the pulse of warmth from Gabriel’s grace before the next spray of bullets hits him.

He reaches for Aurora, the tips of his fingers brushing against her fur as his eyes close and she explodes into dust. 

He opens them to a cascade of brown and gold and the silken sheets of Gabriel’s bed. The bed is right, every sensation just as he remembers it from his few nights there, but the room is just slightly wrong. It is too large, more like the airy solars of old college campuses or portraits of castles, bright with paintings in vivid colors on all the walls. 

“Where?”

“You’re in Heaven, kiddo, and middle-management is after your head.” Gabriel thrums with grace, Sam’s head and shoulders in his lap with his wings draped around them. “Luckily for you and not-so-luckily for Zachariah’s hopes of a promotion, the only angel who knows the back ways into Heaven better than me is Lucy and he’s a little bit banished.”

“Thought you were in witness protection,” Sam croaks, patting the bed until Aurora leaps up and lays across his knees. 

“Mikey and Lucy are a bit wrapped up in their little drama to care about little ol’ me and Raphael only really cares about his duty to protect Daddy’s prophets. All the others have to obey me, to a degree, and there’s a big _leave me alone_ order in place for now.” Gabriel sighs. “Deano will come looking for you sooner or later. Cassie can reach out to him enough for that.”

“How did you find me?”

“Bloody and a little bit dead.”

“Gabriel.”

“You set off alarm bells in Heaven this time, sasquatch. You and Deano are getting to be common sights at the Pearly Gates, Pete says, and they’ve even accepted the hint of angel that clings to Deano without too many questions because that’s what angels do. They obey without question. This time, you came in with a shard of long-dead archangel lodged in your soul.” Gabriel waggles his eyebrows. “Angel Radio exploded. Haven’t heard it that loud since the first moment in which the Heavenly Host came into being, the first time we heard all of them instead of just Daddy and the four of us. Mikey and Lucy stopped arguing for long enough to yell at the whole lot of them.”

“You followed your grace.”

“I did.” Gabriel pauses, listening to something, and his wings move restlessly. “Deano’s looking for you. I’ll send you somewhere he can find you, but you’ll be out from under my protection. Pray when you’re ready to leave Heaven.”

“Why?”

“Because Cassie’s yanked you out in the past, but with his grace draining away and a piece of archangel stuck to you, he’ll only be able to grab Deano this time. Don’t tell Deano. I doubt Cassie’s admitted it, even to himself.”

Gabriel doesn’t snap this time, just rustles his wings, and leaves Sam at the first proper Thanksgiving dinner he ever had except this time he’s his own age and able to see how exceedingly awkward it is. Was. Whatever. Same conversations, no matter his answer. He’s just watching a show, a replay of his own life, and Gabriel really could have picked a better one to drop him into.

Dean shows up not long after, Machaera prowling at his feet and only un-ruffling when she sees Sam and Aurora. The bright searchlight through the windows that reminds him of a malevolent version of the light filling Gabriel’s room where he woke up. Grace, he decides, and not as overwhelming as Gabriel’s, so probably Zachariah or one of his minions. Or one of Michael’s, but he’s pretty sure Zachariah is one of Michael’s head minions right now, or at least he thinks he is. 

Either way, best to hide. Zach will move on eventually and Dean says Cas needs them to find Eden or something like that, follow the Axis Mundi. Sam can almost hear Gabriel’s snort of derision, but this time he’s pretty sure it’s in his head. 

“That would be Zachariah,” Cas tells them, grainy and distorted over the television. 

“Figured that one out, thanks,” Machaera says from her spot next to Aurora. They’ve been talking in hushed tones, but both Dean and Sam left them to it. If it was important, their daemons would have spoken louder. 

Well, Aurora would have included him. Machaera’s been stubborn lately because Dean’s been paying more attention to Cas than her and apparently Septimana can’t groom her as well as he does, though not for lack of trying. 

“God talks to Joshua,” Cas says. “You need to find the Garden.” 

Cas fizzles out again, and Dean finds the next link on the road, the Axis Mundi or whatever. They end up in Dean’s memories, comforting Mom about her relationship with Dad while Sam and Aurora watch on, helpless. Then back in Sam’s head, his two weeks alone that were wonderful for him and Aurora but leaves Machaera hissing and Dean stiff and cold. Then the night Sam set out on his own, which Dean doesn’t initially recognize but Machaera flattens herself to the ground and growls anytime Aurora comes close to her upon seeing. 

The argument lets Zachariah get too close to them. 

“You can’t hide from angels in Heaven,” Zachariah calls as they run through the woods. “I only want to send you back to Earth!”

“Yeah fucking right,” Dean grumbles as they sprint away. “I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, asshole!”

“There may be a little bit of quality torture,” Zach says. “But what’s a little bit of torture between friends? You’ll be begging to say yes.”

Sam’s on the verge of calling out to Gabriel, figuring he can zap Zachariah into nothingness and probably give him a taste of his bit of quality torture while they do so, when the man in the Luchador mask and his similarly masked daemon appear. 

“Follow me,” he says in a terrible accent.

“Yes, follow the strange man into the shed,” Dean mocks, but they follow him anyways in lieu of anything better to do. Sam squeezes in last, hustling Aurora and Machaera in first and hoping there’s enough room in their mystery Luchador’s slightly sketchy shed. 

“Now that we’ve dealt with the crazy angel,” the Luchador says, stepping into the Roadhouse and stripping off the mask. 

_Blah, blah, blah,_ Gabriel says in his head. _Been there, seen this. You die far too much for it to be interesting. Let’s fast-forward a little bit._

Ash and Dean and another figure who he can’t recognize all blur in front of him, then through a scenery change and into what looks like Mom and Zachariah and he offers up a silent thank-you to Gabriel’s boredom because he sure as shit didn’t want to see that.

“Couldn’t even close on a couple of flannel-wearing maggots,” Zachariah scoffs as Gabriel lets time play regularly again. _I like that insult,_ Gabriel says, _although I suppose I object to his application of it._

“I am a fouler enemy to have than Lucifer,” he snarls. “He may be strong, but _I am petty_.”

Gabriel fast-forwards again when Joshua appears, telling Sam _I like Zachariah’s insults, but Joshua’s a bit of a bore and Daddy doesn’t care._

“I’ll let Castiel drag you back, now,” Joshua tells them. “Do try to stay alive, this time. My brother doesn’t have that much grace to waste any longer.”

Joshua poofs out. 

Dean and Machaera aren’t long in following him.

“Gabriel, I need you now,” he calls, Aurora sitting patiently by his heels, alone but for each other in the middle of the Garden. 

“I never really left, kiddo,” Gabriel says as he appears, brightening the Garden with his very presence. Epistola soars out of his light, landing on Aurora’s back with a delighted screech. Gabriel grins, but there’s a solemnity about him that Sam hasn’t seen since they trapped him in a circle of holy fire and confronted him about his heritage. 

“Gabriel, what aren’t you telling me?”

“Do you trust me?”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Neither is that.” Gabriel’s mouth twitches in what might be an aborted attempt at a smile, and he holds out his hands. The Garden shifts slightly, making the room for him to spread all six wings. Gabriel shimmers with his grace, all the power contained underneath his skin… not so contained any longer. 

“You’re serious.”

“For once, I am. Answer me, Sam Winchester. Do you trust me?”

Sam stares back at him. “Gabriel, I let you into my bed—“

“It was my bed,” Gabriel interjects.

“Rather enthusiastically,” Sam continues as if Gabriel hadn’t interrupted, “after you killed Dean two hundred or so times to try and teach me a lesson, trapped us in TV Land, and combined me with the Impala. Yes, Gabriel, I trust you, so would you tell me what’s going on?”

“Saving you.” Gabriel takes a deep breath and a step forward. “And taking a stand.” Gabriel’s wings wrap around them and he folds his arms around Sam, squeezing him tight without crushing his ribs. “Have faith in me, Sammy, ‘cause things are about to get complicated.”

Gabriel’s hand slips under Sam’s shirt and the edge of his jeans, cupping his hip, and then it sears hot. Gabriel holds him tight against his body with his other arm, cradling him between warm skin and warmer wings and kissing enough of his grace into Sam to bury the pain. 

“Time to send you back to Deano,” he says with one last brush of his lips over Sam’s. He snaps, and the world shifts.

“You can have this back,” Cas says, handing Dean his necklace. “It’s useless now.”

Sam sits up, examining the blood-and-ichor soaked bed and Aurora by his side, both of them whole once again. His hip aches, but he doesn’t dare check it right now, not with both Dean and Cas in the room and looking at each other with betrayed hurt in their eyes. Aurora leans hard against his hip, licking his hand instead of saying anything aloud. 

Sam’s ears ring and Cas claps his hands over his own ears, dropping to his knees and curling around Septimana protectively. 

“Cas? Cas?!?” Dean drops down next to him, Machaera standing guard, until the ringing stops and Cas slowly uncurls. Machaera immediately replaces him, curling around Septimana, and she slowly shifts from an armadillo back to her usual kitten form. 

“What the hell was that?” Sam asks shakily.

“Archangels,” Cas says as Dean helps him back to his feet. “The archangels are fighting.”

“Yeah, Michael and Lucifer. No surprise there,” Dean says.

“No,” Cas says, grabbing Sam by the shoulder and mojo-ing them all just outside of Bobby’s. “All four of them.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm planning on renaming a bunch of the chapters because I was lazy about naming, just in case it starts saying I've changed things. Hope you enjoy this one!


	16. Bat Out Of Hell

 

Raphael’s vessel is mildly irritated, which for his brother is seething rage. He was Daddy’s attempt at mediation, at an archangel who would temper Michael’s self-righteous decisiveness and Lucifer’s headstrong opinions and Gabriel’s mischief. 

“You have abandoned your post for many years, Gabriel,” Raphael tells him, utterly disappointed. 

“Not going to lie, I figured that was going to be Michael’s beef.” Gabriel flexes his fingers, but doesn’t go for his blade. They’ll do this the old-fashioned way, with fists and wings and grace, like they did even before Let There Be Light. 

Michael unfolds and folds his wings, ruffling the red-gold feathers and crossing his arms. He’s young, mimicking the form of the youngest, the not-Winchester- Gabriel may or may not have sulked in Sam’s past after TV Land for an amount of time he won’t admit to- but the deeply disappointed frown is all Michael. 

“You abandoned your family.”

“My _family_ was being torn apart by you and Lucifer!”

“If anyone’s to blame, it isn’t the angel who spent the last millennia alone in a box,” Lucifer complains, materializing an icy throne as he sits down. “Completely alone, locked away without even your inane chatter for company. It is entirely possible that it would have driven me mad, but did you care, Michael?”

“By order of the Lord,” Michael proclaims.

“So much for family.” Lucifer tsks, intentionally spreading his wings. The feathers are still silver and white, the shining wings of the Morningstar, but in far worse shape than Gabriel’s own have ever been. He’s been away from angels, away from anyone he trusted to preen his wings for him until Sammy, but at least he tried to keep them in good shape with Stropha’s help. Lucifer doesn’t even look like he tried, and Oriens is ragged. 

Michael breathes Lucifer’s way, melting his throne out from under him and sending him tumbling to the ground. Lucifer surges to his feet, a snarl twisting his vessel’s features, and Oriens lunges at Primoris. Sanitas, Raphael’s daemon, shifts into a wooly mammoth and throws them apart from each other. 

“Are we done? This is exactly why I left in the first place.” Gabriel leaves without waiting, taking a roundabout way home that consists of trips across the world, between Earth and Heaven, and even a brief jaunt into Hell. 

Lucifer catches up after Hell, cornering him on a plateau in Tibet, because Gabriel figured he would and is nothing if not subtle. It’s a barren place, far from civilization, the type of place he would go under heavy protective magic to let Stropha take care of his wings. This was one of his favorites, and there are still traces of his visits clinging to the place. Scorch marks and gouges in the rock dominate, leftover from his rage after TV Land went horribly wrong.

“You know why I’m here.” Lucifer conjures himself another throne and it begins to snow. His melodramatic streak was certainly not dimmed by his time in the Cage. Gabriel makes a couch because he’s practical like that and couches are one of the better inventions of the humans. 

“I know why you’re here,” Gabriel agrees. 

Neither of them bothers to fold their wings away for politeness’ sake. They’ve been away from Heaven for about as long as each other, away from the rules regarding wings and social strata. Lucifer shines even still, but his grace bears the taint of madness. The archangel before him is a tattered, broken shell of his brother, and Gabriel questions Daddy’s decision to set Michael and Lucifer on this path not for the first time and certainly not for the last.

“I’m not going to judge you for refusing to stand with me against Michael,” Lucifer begins. “I’m not even going to judge you for abandoning us. What I am going to judge you for, _little brother_ , is infringing on another angel’s claim.”

Lucifer’s voice is utterly casual, but the flurry of emotions battle for dominance over his face, flicking seamlessly _betrayal love hate hurt anger hurt mine mine mine_. Gabriel forces himself to remain equally calm because right now, there’s a chance Michael and Raphael might side with him but the moment he’s more dramatic about it than Lucifer he’s done for. 

“And how well do you know Sam Winchester, brother dear? Do you know that he still has mixed feelings on Asia, that he doesn’t really like salad but gets tired of burgers, that he wouldn’t give up his life as a hunter but clings to the little normalcies anyways? Did he tell you why Aurora settled in that shape, the catalysts that shaped his own rebellion?” Gabriel sprawls across his couch, carefully artless and every muscle coiled and ready to move, his daemon leaving Stropha’s fox and shifting to one of Epistola’s favorites, the golden dragon crouched behind him. 

“He’s been destined to be mine since the beginning of time and you know it.” Oriens circles as Lucifer speaks, a massive bird of prey that forms one of the missing evolutionary links to modern birds, the same form she had when Michael and Primoris threw them down to Hell. Of course, back then it was a glimpse into the future. 

“And I tried to respect that, Lucy, I really did. I would have kept them trapped in TV Land until they agreed to let you and Michael in, kept them channel surfing and Cassie playing with the Teletubbies, but I slipped up.” Gabriel bites off the last sentence, afraid of his impulsive nature getting the better of him and giving away too much. He doesn’t just have himself to protect, he has Sammy. 

“You slipped,” Lucifer raises a skeptical eyebrow, “and put a claiming mark on _my_ Boy King?”

_Don’t say it, Gabriel._ “More like I slipped and fell into bed with him.” _Damn._

Lucy roars with anger, both from his vessel’s vocal cords and the shrill ring of his true voice, and he lunges for Gabriel before even Oriens can lunge for Epistola. Frost explodes out from him, turning the plateau into a rink, and Gabriel takes to the sky to avoid him. 

There will be tales about this, Gabriel thinks, just as there are tales of Lucifer’s first fall, of shining beings fighting in the sky. His grace shines bright and he can feel the echo of what he left with Sam, a whisper calling him back to Sam’s side. 

Lucifer tackles him, sending them both careening to the side, and for all the beating of twelve wings they spiral to the ground landing punches and kicks and Gabriel manages a nasty knee to Lucifer’s groin. Lucifer, the originator of dirty tactics, hasn’t kept up with the times and Gabriel has. Unfortunately, Lucy knows him and he’s always had a disturbingly sharp learning curve. 

Epistola screeches out a warning and Gabriel snaps his wings wide, soaring back to height and then slipping between worlds to step back into Heaven. He ends up back in the Garden, the trees slipping away to be replaced with flowers and a hedge labyrinth. 

Perfect. 

He ducks into the maze, dampening down his grace to the level of a normal angel and duplicating himself and Epistola several times over. Each copy takes off in a different direction and Gabriel himself in a different direction still, hoping Michael or Raphael will stall Lucifer. 

It doesn’t work. 

Lucy ices the entire maze, destroying a section of the holiest of sanctuaries, a section tended to by other angels but still Lucy’s original design. Hoarfrost creeps over Gabriel’s skin, chill sinking into his bones, and he could curse his brother for being clever. One by one, he vanishes his clones and draws them back in, blazing hot as all the archangels but Lucy again. 

“Enough,” Lucy snarls, landing in front of him. Oriens pins Epistola down, talons digging into her side so gold leaks down her side and a phantom ache mirrors along Gabriel’s ribs. Lucifer smiles at the confirmation that he hasn’t fallen for one of Gabriel’s tricks. “You put a claim on what’s mine. Brother or not, I will reclaim him.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Lucifer’s blade drops into his hand and Oriens rears her beak back to tear out Epistola’s throat. Epistola wriggles once, then shrinks to a bug and escapes Oriens’ grasp. Lucifer doesn’t waste a moment before burying his blade in Gabriel’s heart, twisting once, and freeing it. 

There’s a tiny poof of gold and a massive ricochet of power through Heaven, and Michael and Raphael find Lucifer standing over Gabriel’s still form and the wings seared into the ground beneath the frost. 

From his hiding place inside one of the hedges, Gabriel leaves his grace thrumming through Heaven and a merest thread maintaining the illusion of his body while Epistola joins him there, shaking the gold dust she summoned off ladybug wings. 

“There are _lines_ , Lucifer, that even we dare not cross!” Michael argues, knocking Lucifer’s blade to the ground and whirling him across the Garden, two evenly matched forces slamming into each other again and again. 

Raphael, ever the healer, examines Gabriel’s prone form and his head snaps up, staring at Gabriel’s hedge. Gabriel sticks a hand out and waves before letting it dissolve. 

“Why?”

“Lucy would have killed me. He’s not the brother we loved, Raphael. I don’t even recognize who he’s become.”

Raphael waves that off. “Not why you deflected Lucifer. Clever, that. You knew Michael would avenge you. Why are you trying to defend the Winchesters, Gabriel? Why are you hiding them from us?”

“Because this is stupid.” Gabriel sighs. “I don’t want to fight you, brother. That’s what this is all about. I don’t want us to continue to be ripped apart. You’re my family.”

Raphael settles into an offensive posture, black and silver wings flaring wide behind him, and Sanitas and Epistola both shift into forms with lots of claws and teeth. “You abandoned your post long ago. It is too late for platitudes.”

Heaven shakes and angels scream, but their voices are muted against his focus as Raphael circles. He can’t let himself falter. Maybe, if he’s very very lucky and even more clever, they won’t destroy Heaven with their fight.

 

***

 

Lucifer shrieks, and Gabriel and Raphael drag them apart again. They are both bruised and bleeding sluggishly from their own battle, but neither of them actually wants Michael and Lucifer dead. Gabriel wants his family together. If he has to make a stand, that’s it. He’s spent millennia avoiding the reality of the apocalypse and Michael and Lucifer’s deathmatch, unwilling to take a side because there was no side that ended happy. Now, he’s making his own side. 

Raphael wants the apocalypse to happen because it is Daddy’s will, which means he needs both Michael and Lucifer to not kill each other now before they take Sam and Dean over. It’s an uneasy truce, but for now they’re united in fighting to keep their stronger brothers from ripping each other to shreds. 

Gabriel buries his fingers in Lucifer’s middle wings, yanking hard on the feathers closest to his back to draw Lucy’s attention back to him. Lucy flares cold in defense, but his grace splutters and fades. Raphael’s strategy was brilliant, to let them wear each other out and only intervene when necessary. 

“No more,” he breathes, a couch materializing underneath him so he doesn’t have far to fall when he takes Lucy down. Lucy collapses against him, head lolling, and Gabriel curls his wings around the tatters of Lucy’s own. On the other side of what used to be the clearing, Raphael is tending to Michael’s wounds as best he can. Angels creep closer to the destruction wrought across what used to be their most sacred place, the space reduced to the blank slate of empty existence that it was when the four of them were created here. 

“Just let him kill me,” Lucy whispers, his vessel’s voice shredded from screaming in Lucy’s true voice. “Don’t let him put me back in the Cage, Gabriel. Anything but that.”

Gabriel cradles his older brother to him- older by a fraction of the existence before time, that which was a heartbeat and an eternity, and shifts one of his wings away. Slowly, ever so slowly, he reaches down to one of Lucy’s inner wings, running his fingers over the mussed and broken feathers and straightening what he can. 

“I want my family back,” he says, equally as quietly, “but I won’t give Sam up to you.”

Lucy closes his eyes and sags against Gabriel’s chest. “I won’t go back to the Cage.”

“Acknowledge that my claim supersedes yours now, Lucy.”

“You can’t let him send me back there. You have no idea what it’s like, Gabriel, all alone without even the songs of our brothers for company. I will burn the world, Earth and Heaven and  Hell alike, if you try to send me back.”

“I don’t want my family shattered again, Lucifer, but I won’t promise anything unless you acknowledge my claim. Sam Winchester is free from any angelic interference that I would object to under pain of smiting.” Gabriel’s voice takes on that hard edge of Michael’s, the edge that says he will brook no argument on his point, that it is his terms or none at all. Lucifer doesn’t respond, Oriens shuffling awkwardly to lie next to him without changing her form. Gabriel stares at the two of them, and the wrongness about his brother crystallizes into a sudden moment of clarity that is over far too fast. 

“Oriens hasn’t shifted form the entire time,” Epistola points out, and Lucifer visibly winces. 

“You… no.” Gabriel doesn’t want to believe what he’s seeing, but it makes sense, tying in Lucifer’s tattered wings and his tainted grace and Oriens’ uncharacteristic stillness. “She doesn’t, does she? You’ve been surrounded by demons so long you forgot what it meant to be an angel.”

“Archangels weren’t meant to fall,” he grits out, sheltering Oriens with a shaky hand and a shakier wing. Gabriel has to stop himself from reaching for Epistola, but she flies to his free shoulder anyways. Oriens tucks her head under her wing, hiding, and Lucifer grimaces as he stretches one of his middle wings that Michael snapped the bones of around her. Gabriel wishes he could do something, but Raphael was the healer.

When he finally speaks, Lucifer’s voice is barely more than a hoarse rasp, which is probably for the best because the angels creep closer and making deals with the Devil is probably something that would be frowned upon for a runaway archangel.

“You have a deal, Gabriel. In return for not returning to the Cage, I acknowledge that your claim supersedes mine and that the human Samuel Winchester belongs to the Archangel Gabriel.”

“It is agreed, then, and sworn by grace and by blood.”

“By grace and by blood,” Lucifer echoes. “Take me somewhere safe, Gabriel.”


	17. Out Of The Frying Pan (And Into The Fire)

 

“It’s over,” Cas says, and Sam slumps back against the wall of the panic room in relief. Aurora is coiled in on herself, paws over her ears, like she has been for hours. 

Gabriel has to be alive. He would have felt something if he died, right? He slides his fingers over his hip, just barely edging under his shirt to feel the raised skin of Gabriel’s handprint. It’s a little comforting right now, even though he’s still not entirely sure how he feels about Gabriel’s claim. 

“And?”

“I don’t know.” Cas ducks his head in admitting that. “The archangels stopped screaming at each other, but none of the other angels understand what they’re seeing.”

Sam pushes himself to his feet, petting Aurora to get her back to her feet reluctantly. She pads after him, brushing against the frame of the bed that is still in there from his attempted detox. Septimana, raises her head grumpily but Machaera, sprawled mostly on top of Dean, doesn’t stir. 

“I’m going upstairs, then. Don’t feel like fighting over that lumpy bed any longer.”

“It wouldn’t be wise.”

“Cas, is the panic room really going to do any good against archangels? It barely has angel proofing measures and those are currently disengaged.”

“It makes Dean feel better.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Yeah, and that’s fine and all for Dean, but he’s hogging the bed. Don’t come looking unless there’s another disaster, Cas.”

Sam leaves before Cas has a chance to reply, climbing the two flights of stairs to the cupboard of a room he and Dean used to share whenever Dad dropped them off here. Nowadays, they fight over who has to go sleep here instead of on the surprisingly comfortable couch because neither of them fit particularly well on a narrow twin mattress. 

Sam closes the door behind him, Aurora bounding onto the bed to the creak of ancient springs, and looks around the closest thing they had to a home apart from the Impala. Dean’s car may be home now, but under Dad it was his home, his rules, and they never got to have as much of a childhood as they did inside these four walls. 

There’s the crayon and marker drawings on the walls, sketches of monsters and sights they’d seen while travelling and rudimentary protective sigils that Bobby taught them. There’s a stain on the floor, half-hidden under the bed, from when Bobby left on a short hunt and Dean snuck into his liquor cabinet and tried to hide it when Bobby returned early. There’s the oft-patched quilt on the bed, one made by Karen’s mother for her and Bobby’s wedding that Bobby tucked around them on cold, drafty nights because ‘you don’t waste time with feelings when there are kids who need a blanket’. The loose floorboard where Dean hid cigarettes until Bobby found them and tanned his hide for it, the cracked full-length mirror hanging on the closet door that used to be Karen’s, Sam’s stacks of books accidentally stolen from libraries when Dad made them leave town in the middle of the night without any warning. 

He always meant to return those, he muses, tracing the Dewey decimal number labels. They’re organized by location and within that, numerically by those now-dusty labels. 

He doesn’t lock the door- Dean would knock, they made a promise about that years ago, but a locked door makes him suspicious- but when he reaches for the hem of his shirt Aurora perks up.

“Here? Not a good idea, not since you haven’t told either of them.”

“Quiet,” he shushes her, “unless you want them to hear us.”

“You’re the boss, boss.”

He tugs his shirt over his head, tossing it on top of Aurora, and unbuttons his jeans, pushing down one side to inspect his hip in the mirror. Gabriel’s palm curved around the jut of his hipbone, fingertips curling around to brush at the edge of his butt, and the mark it left is livid red and raised against his skin. The skin is warmer there, closer to the temperature of Gabriel’s own. He remembers telling Dean that the mark on his shoulder was clearly a brand, back when Cas had just yanked him out of Hell. 

Sam doesn’t know whether to be glad that Gabriel poured enough grace into him to make it painless or upset that he wasted grace knowing he was going into a fight with Lucifer. 

For that matter, Gabriel really could have asked. There had to be a better way to make a stand against his family than putting a sign on Sam saying ‘hands off’.

“He did ask,” Aurora reminds him. “He asked if you trusted him, and you do.”

Sam drops his shirt and buttons his jeans, flopping down next to Aurora with his legs hanging over the edge of the bed. She rolls on to her back, demanding a belly rub, because she has always had uncomplicated desires and belly rubs are nice. 

A crash of glass from the kitchen startles them out of their quiet reverie, followed by Bobby’s curse and a slammed door. Aurora rolls back over, hackles rising, and Sam reaches for the silver knife hidden between the bed frame and the wall, waiting for Bobby to tell them either to take up arms or to get the hell out. 

“What the bloody hell have you idjits done this time?”

Sam winces. Shit. He and Aurora take the stairs two at a time, sorting his clothes back out to hide the handprint from Dean. They beat Dean and Cas there, but not Machaera. She’s shadowing Vigilia, both of them with their paws up on the window trying to edge Bobby out to see better. 

“What?”

“Your bloody angel,” Bobby tells him as Cas and Dean round the corner from the basement steps. “Emphasis on the bloody part.”

Aurora bites Machaera’s tail, moving her out of the way, and Sam slides into her place without bumping into Vigilia. Machaera snaps grumpily at Aurora, earning both of them a swat from Bobby. Sam shivers at the touch of someone else touching his daemon, but it’s Bobby. Bobby’s never shied away from taboo and he’s sure not going to start now. 

That’s definitely Gabriel lying on his back in what he assumes must be a puddle of blood, from what Bobby said. He can see all six of Gabriel’s wings splayed across the ground, four of them at angles that he knows they don’t naturally bend at, from Cas’ nigh-on imperceptible wince. The gold is dulled in his feathers, covered in a sheen of drying red and splatters of an uncomfortably familiar shining gold. 

Sam’s frozen at the window for a moment, but Aurora’s already out the door and padding through the red-and-gold to Epistola’s side. She’s a dragon, leathery wings shredded to the bone and curled around her underbelly protectively. 

“Cas,” he calls as he rushes out Bobby’s side door because he doubts gauze and tape will be enough for this one. 

“I cannot heal him,” Cas admits. “I lack the strength for wounds of that extent.”

“You can at least diagnose internal injuries so I don’t do more harm than good, right?”

“I can do that,” he agrees. 

 

***

 

Gabriel’s skin is… well, he’s running a 98.6 right now and Cas is running nearly 104. 

Cas said he was alright to move, but it took keeping Gabriel conscious enough for Epistola to shift into a much smaller dragon and climb into a sling suspended between Aurora and Vigilia before they could try to lift the archangel. Bobby and Dean were sent to clear the panic room, making enough space for Cas to zap Gabriel in with him and Sam on wing duty. 

Sam leans against the wall, Gabriel’s head in his lap and Epistola accepting a tongue bath from Aurora with surprising patience and somewhat more reluctantly from Septimana. The fan turns slowly overhead, circulating the air and barely ruffling Gabriel’s wings. 

“Wet washcloth.” Dean puts it in his hand, setting a bowl next to Sam’s knee. “Will you let Cas work on his wings? He says that’s the worst of it, but he won’t without your permission. Says Gabriel might smite him otherwise.”

“I already asked Cas to do whatever he can.”

“Tell me, Sammy,” Dean says in his obnoxious I’m-older-and-I-know-better voice, “why does Cas need your permission to even touch his own brother?”

“Tell me, Dean,” Sam mimics because he is definitely an adult now, “why do I have to listen to you moaning blasphemous things at Cas at night? Thin walls, brother. Thin walls.”

“I don’t talk about you fucking an archangel,” Dean hisses. “You wanna talk about blasphemy? You’re like blasphemy squared, dude.”

“I prefer the term making sweet, sweet love to one of the most powerful beings in this universe,” Gabriel croaks. “How we doing, sasquatch?”

“Trying to figure out how to set a wing. Cas knows how to set one against your back, but you’ve got four broken and even he’s a little stumped. Turns out Archangel First Aid isn’t in the training manual.” Sam runs the washcloth over Gabriel’s features, slowly wiping away blood in gradual passes before moving on to the blood and ichor caked in his hair. 

“Just leave them. Not like they’ll heal wrong, just slow.” Gabriel tries to push himself up, wrists giving out and collapsing. “Deano, go buy me candy. And a soda. A two-liter or four. Have Cassie flash you to me. Sammy, we’re going home.”

“What?” they ask in unison, and then Gabriel squeezes his eyes shut and his two unbroken wings shiver. 

Flight is… well, Sam would almost say slow, but it is still incredibly fast compared to any other mode of travel. He just feels a few moments of motion, of Gabriel winging his way slowly across the world, before landing roughly on the couch. CSPAN plays in the background and the coffee table disappears to make room for Gabriel, Epistola, and Aurora. 

Horatio snags the remote, hiding it from Epistola, and she sags to the cushions in defeat. Gabriel collapses against Sam again, unable to so much as hold his wings up. 

“You didn’t have that energy to waste,” Sam scolds, glad his washcloth made the trip with him as he continues to wash the blood down Gabriel’s neck and shoulders. Aurora pads to the kitchen to try and find a bowl for fresh water. 

“I know,” Gabriel answers. “That’s why I used yours. Food in the fridge, Sammy. You’ll be pretty hungry soon.”

He passes out, leaving Sam way far from home and utterly exhausted, which is… exactly like a manipulative archangel with massive trauma, actually. He can’t imagine that it’s easy being one of the most powerful things in the universe, especially when injured. Hopefully, the other archangels are in equally bad shape or he might end up in the middle of an angelic ass kicking when Gabriel can’t fight back. 

Sam’s always prided himself on being the practical sort, so he just sets to cleaning Epistola and Gabriel’s wounds and bandaging up whatever he can. Horatio eventually gets bored and offers him the remote, free of bribery. 

“He’s warded the place even stronger,” Aurora says, finishing her inspection.

“How much stronger?”

“Blood wards. Fresh ones, writ in both Gabriel’s own blood and what looks like Epistola’s. His wounds and Epistola’s are mostly broken bones, and even nasty breaks wouldn’t cause that kind of blood loss.” Aurora looks sick, pacing semicircles around Gabriel’s prone form slumped against the couch. “Something’s going on, and I don’t like it.”

“There’s only one thing to do.”

“Run like hell and hope Cas can boost the angel scratches on your ribs to hide you from stalker archangels?”

“I was thinking make lunch and see if he’s got anything useful on that bookshelf of his. How’s a BLT sound?”

Aurora stalks over to the couch and tugs the remote away from Horatio. “You’re an idiot. We’re watching the Food Network, then, so I can pretend you know how to cook.”


	18. It Takes All Kinds Of People

 

“Sam. Sam. Sam.” 

Sam wakes to a finger in his ribs and a faceful of feathers. There’s music a little too loud in the background and Horatio’s trying to eat his pillow, but he’s slept through worse- _thank you, Dean_ \- but he’s a tiny bit ticklish and there’s no sleeping through a sharp poke to the ribs. 

“Sam,” he whines when Sam rolls over and buries his head in his pillow with a sharp yank to save it from Horatio. “Sam. Sam. Sam.”

“What?” Sam grumbles into his pillow, hoping that’ll be enough to make the angel stop poking him and he was up all night tending to Gabriel’s various wounds and at least trying to straighten out the broken bones in his wings so if this isn’t serious, he’s going to swap salt for sugar and make the angel dessert. 

“I don’t understand. I can’t play the fiddle and I have plenty of souls.”

“What?” Sam flips over, pushing a handful of silver and white feathers away and freezing. Silver and white. Not brown and gold. 

Silver and white, soaked in red and gold. He cleaned Gabriel’s wings, as best he can. 

Conclusion: Not Gabriel. And six wings leaves only a few other choices, as far as the lore goes, none of which are particularly people he’d like to wake him up poking him in the ribs with stupidly sharp fingernails. 

He squeezes his eyes shut, hoping to see something different, and pushes the bloodied pale wing away. Lucifer stares back at him, pale eyes and blond hair and utterly, utterly confused. 

“That hurts,” the Devil complains, pulling Sam’s hand out of his wing finger by finger. 

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Lucifer pulls back, offended. “The music, it confuses me. I do not, nor have I ever, played the fiddle, and I do not understand the value of one made of gold. Musical theory says it ought to be useless as an instrument when made of gold, though I suppose it would have worth if melted down. Why did Johnny not want an equivalent lump sum of gold? It would be far easier to transport.”

Sam pushes himself up against the arm of the couch, scooting back from the ex-archangel perched almost on his lap with six shredded wings dragging behind him. Lucifer sits back on his heels, almost toppling over on top of Gabriel still sprawled at the end of the couch. Some sort of prehensile bird is perched on the bookshelf, hunched over and glaring at everyone. 

His life is _weird_.

“Ignoring how the hell you even got here, what made you think listening to _The Devil Went Down To Georgia_ and crouching over me like a deranged vulture was any kind of good idea?”

Lucifer gives him a confused look that is eerily familiar from Dean trying to teach Cas about pop culture, and Sam’s not going to think about that now. In fact, Sam thinks he’s being pretty damn reasonable right now. Dean would have started shooting already. 

Being weaponless in a room with two archangels, one who wants to ride him to prom and end the world and the other who wants to keep him in bed forever, probably has something to do with that. Without Gabriel, he can’t do anything about Lucifer. 

“There was a music box in your pocket. Nick used them before, with… speakers?”

Sam buries his face in his hands, counts to ten, and hopes this is all some joke of Gabriel’s in rather poor taste. 

Archangel passed out on the couch like a battered frat boy after finals week? Check. Other archangel leaving stains of red everywhere while he goes to poke at Sam’s iPod some more? Check. Miniature dragon snoozing next to his own wolf while whatever the hell Lucifer’s daemon is watches from above? Check.

“Is this some convoluted scheme to use me to finish your apocalypse? Because if so, Gabriel and I are going to have _words_.”

“Words are good. Gabriel has many of them, many more than your puny human vocabulary.” Lucifer hums as he explores Gabriel’s kitchen, testing knives by driving them through the cutting board and tasting whatever he finds, sticking fingers in containers of icing and licking things and throwing them over his shoulder when he’s done. He takes one bite each out of seven different apples before discarding them all and moving on to Gabriel’s supply of sprinkles. 

“Dear God,” he prays aloud, “please let this be a weird dream.”

“Father isn’t listening,” Lucifer tells him. “Prayers to him go straight to voicemail- er, Michael. That is voicemail, right? Nick didn’t really call anyone.”

“Castiel, I pray to thee, could you really keep Dean away for right now? Just give him a slice of pie and another of blasphemy, he’ll be alright. He prefers pumpkin, this time of year, but he’ll always take blueberry in a pinch.”

“If that’s what prayer looks like these days, no wonder my brothers are restless. But then again, you always were undeserving apes, my demons are proof of it.” Lucifer wanders out with a jar of raspberry jam balanced on top of a jar of marshmallow fluff, his daemon twisting sideways in midair to go through the door and claim an oversized jar of Nutella. 

Three of his wings are dragging on the ground, bones shattered enough that he can’t hold them aloft and definitely twisted at wrong angles. Another two are shredded and missing large clumps of feathers, the final one- his middle wing on his left side- folded as best as he can with the others not in their right places. Lucifer doesn’t seem to mind them.

“You’re smearing blood everywhere.”

Lucifer shrugs. “It happens.”

Sam stares at him. “What do you mean, it happens?”

Lucifer scoops up some marshmallow fluff on one finger, sucking it clean and offering the next bite to his daemon. She takes it, leaving his finger bleeding from her beak, and he ignores it. “How do they punish angels, Sam? They strip them of their grace. They couldn’t take mine, so they put me somewhere it would always be drained.” Lucifer sits down, one of his dragging wings crunching under his weight.

_Gabriel,_ Sam prays silently, _I could really do with you waking up any time now._

“Sorry, but Gabriel isn’t listening.” Lucifer taps his head. “Goes to the next angel up the pecking order, which happens to be yours truly.”

Sam just sighs and goes to look for something Lucifer didn’t pillage in the kitchen. Cans. Gabriel had a pantry of canned food- _for lazy days, Sam, sometimes I’m too lazy to imagine what I want food I don’t need to eat to taste like_ \- and he would have heard Lucifer ripping cans open because he doubts the Devil knows how to use a can opener. 

“I’m offended.”

“Really? Because I could be thinking much worse things about you and they’d all be true. And stop eavesdropping.”

“It isn’t eavesdropping if you think so loud.” Lucifer sprawls across the couch and really, it’s a big room but not one designed for two angels with six wings apiece and none of them neatly folded. “I can’t help it. We were meant to be one, Sam. Mind, body, and soul.”

Gabriel groans, raising one hand and smacking limply at Lucifer’s calf. He looks down as if he can’t decide whether to be amused or suitably chastised. 

“My…” Lucifer frowns like the word tastes sour in his mouth, “apologies.”

“Ignore him,” Gabriel croaks. “Lucy, fix your wings, you’ve got the mojo to do it. And fix mine while you’re at it. And then put them away.”

“And what do I get in return?”

“I won’t make you replace my dessert pantry. And _don’t_ think you can get away with mojo-ing up replacements, because they won’t taste right and I’ll know.”

Lucifer rolls his eyes, giving Gabriel his best bitchface, which is actually rather impressive given that he’s spent the last eternity alone in a box and Sam seriously doubts that the Cage had mirrors. Lucifer flicks a halfhearted glare at him, then speaks a few words in Enochian. He’s utterly silent as his bones snap back into place, cracks sealing over and letting him fold them neatly against his back while gashes heal and feathers grow back. Lucifer stretches and slides over next to Gabriel, leaving Horatio spluttering on shed feathers. He lifts Gabriel’s face to him, cocking his head to the side an examining his brother’s vessel 

Gabriel whimpers when the first bones snap back into place, then squeezes his eyes shut and Sam can hear the strains of his true voice just beyond the realm of comfortable hearing. Lucifer supports him with one hand, carding his fingers through Gabriel’s hair with the other. When he’s healed, the angel song- more like screams, really, but Sam doesn’t want to think about that- cuts off abruptly and Gabriel sags against Lucifer, shifting his wings tentatively and then folding them away into nothingness. Epistola shakes out her own wings, then shifts to a fox and curls up next to Aurora on in her spot.

“Thank-“ Gabriel cuts off to cough, then clears his throat. “Thank you, Lucy.”

“You gave me sanctuary,” Lucifer replies, scowling at the couch and trying to dig through the cushions for the remote. Horatio spits a few Cheetos at him, but no remote. Gabriel snaps and the TV changes to cartoons, which seems to bemuse Lucifer even more than CSPAN.

“About that. One of you want to explain what the hell happened in Heaven?”

“We fought.” Gabriel fights to his feet, still wobbly, and takes the can of ravioli from Sam, wishing the lid away and dumping it in a bowl. He shoves it in the microwave, grimacing about the state Lucifer left it in and finding a bag of candy stashed behind the silverware. 

“Gabriel let me kill him,” Lucifer offers. 

“I faked my death.”

“Michael got upset about that, tried to kill me in return.”

“They decimated the Garden.”

“And so Gabriel’s letting me, to use your human colloquialism, ‘bunk over’.”

Sam lets Gabriel drag him back to the couch, sitting down and getting a lapful of archangel. “That isn’t helpful.”

“Lucy here isn’t going to hurt you or ride you to prom or start an apocalypse or any of that fun stuff. It might seem like he’s trying to annoy you to death, but don’t worry, he was always like that.”

“I believe you’re confusing me with yourself.”

“Never, Lucy. Eat your ravioli.”

“I’m your older brother, Gabriel. You do not dare treat Michael like that.”

“Yeah, well Michael isn’t a big bag of dicks sometimes. Anyways, Sam, Lucy’s here to behave himself in the eyes of Heaven and generally make a nuisance of himself in the eyes of me until such time as he and Mikey can figure out how to stop throwing their Brussels sprouts at each other.”

“I don’t know what those are.”

“Be grateful.”

Sam closes his eyes and prays that Cas hurry and zap them here because right now, he’s not entirely sure that he isn’t dreaming. Or having a nightmare. Hell, this is too confusing. 

And he lamented being unable to explain his life when all he did was hunt ghosts and the occasional monster.

 


	19. Original Sin

 

Sam had thought being courted by an archangel was weird.

It isn’t like Cas’ mildly confusing courtship of Dean was exactly what Dean expected out of his life, but then again Dean never expected much more than a bottle in his hand and picking up girls in bars until such time as only whiskey would have him. Dean expected ghosts and monsters, hunting and hustling pool, playing up the bad boy image until such time as he becomes the next Dad or Bobby or Rufus. Instead, he got an angel in a trenchcoat who doesn’t understand pop culture but is the only person who understands that the only things more important to Dean than Cas are Sam and pie. And somehow, he’s okay with that. 

Septimana still doesn’t talk much, but Machaera has submitted to the indignity of saddlebags with surprising aplomb so that Septimana can ride by her side when they hunt. They live on the road, and when they stop for the night Sam would need a separate motel room, if he actually stayed in the motel.

No, for the past three months since the Apocalypse sort of petered out before it ever began in force, he gets picked up at every day at precisely 6:35 PM Eastern Standard Time unless one of them prays to both Gabriel and Lucifer to reschedule. Gabriel accepts a simple _hey, Gabe, going to be late with some B &E to the haunted mansion tonight_, but Lucifer insists on either a five-paragraph essay or a sonnet, depending on the day. 

They’ve nearly been caught breaking in somewhere multiple times because Lucifer pops in at 6:35 EST and loudly laments the fact that dinner is going to get cold as if they weren’t going to materialize it out of nothing the moment he arrived back home. Against some nasty monsters, Sam’ll pray to one but not the other because an irritable archangel is the best finishing move on any monster, ever. Gabriel plays with them first, but Lucifer goes full on former-Archangel-of-the-Lord with the smiting and the silver sword and Cas has had to zap Dean and Machaera away a few times. 

So far, Sam’s been fine watching either archangel work because he’s never running on empty on angel grace. It doesn’t actively make him feel powerful, not the way demon blood did, but there’s always a touch of grace in Gabriel’s kisses and in the occasional swipe of feathers against bare skin. 

And that’s some of the oddest part, how easily Sam’s life has adapted. Not just Dean’s acceptance of the fact that Sam wakes up wrapped in angel wings- and not always those of the angel he sleeps with because Lucifer doesn’t understand personal space and Gabriel doesn’t understand why it should bother anyone but himself, and clearly it doesn’t bother him.

_Gabriel,_ Sam prays when they are solidly in the afternoon and he hasn’t figured out what’s killing people yet and Cas is too busy sneaking off to the Impala ‘to get pie, Sam, to get pie’- as if Sam doesn’t know what that means- to help. _Hey, Gabe, I know I said I was only doing research and would be done on time today, but I have no idea what we’re dealing with and the library’s open until 8._

Sam returns to his book, expecting a burger that’s going to get Dean tossed out to land in front of him or Cas’ newest excuse as to why Dean’s staking out the bar instead of researching when the opposite chair scrapes against the floor. Instead, he gets a book slid across the table. 

“What language is this even in?”

“Archaic Sumerian.”

“Lucifer, I can’t read Archaic Sumerian.”

“I don’t understand the problem. I can translate all languages.”

Sam pushes the book back across the table. “Pick the details out of my head, then, and tell me what it is. In the meantime, I could really use a snack. There’s a cafe around the corner, take me there.”

His life got a lot easier once he figured out that angel mojo makes nobody question their sudden appearances and disappearances and both Gabriel and Lucifer have no shortage of mojo. Also, his and Dean’s prank wars are intense when angels can be bribed into helping. They don’t use too much mojo- it’s still the days of superglue on Dean’s beer and videos left open with the volume up on Sam’s laptop, they are just a lot more intricate. Angel warding screensavers on his laptop, Oriens circling high enough to pretend to be a seagull, even Epistola doing a very good mimicry of Septimana in order to surreptitiously sneak superglue on his beer bottle. 

Sam wishes he could take credit for that one, but it was all Gabriel and Lucifer’s idea. He didn’t even know what happened until their waitress winked with golden eyes and Lucifer fell out of the air laughing.

So, maybe there’s a little more angelic involvement on his part, but they’re useless more often than not, too busy pranking each other to help Sam. 

“The coffee shop or the pastry shop?” Lucifer stares at him, openly picking his brain. “I disagree, Sam. The pastry shop will also have coffee and they have a larger layout which is far more forgiving of large daemons, of which both Aurora and Oriens are classified.”

“Fine.”

Lucifer wraps one cold hand around Sam’s wrist, wings unfolding from his back. One set of his primaries brushes Sam’s arm, sending a cold shock of his grace skittering across his skin. Moments later, they’re sitting at a booth next to a window, Aurora at Sam’s feet and Oriens perched on the back of the booth keeping watch. 

“If you ruin your dinner, Gabriel will be upset.”

“Who are you, my older brother?”

“I’m his older brother. Dean informs me that means I am to prevent him from ever being upset, and that I ought to extend that to Castiel as well.” Lucifer frowns. “I was banished before Castiel was more than a fledgling, but I can do for Gabriel what Michael fails to do for me.”

“If only Dad could see Dean giving advice on how to be an older brother to the second-oldest angel in existence.”

“Fourth-oldest being in existence, behind Michael, Father, and Death.”

“Because that makes all the difference. Go on, I know you picked out all the details. Flash-fried corpses, half-eaten pancreas, locked room murders? Would be fun stuff, if they weren’t killing twice a week and the next one is due tomorrow.” A few other diners look their way when Sam says that, only to return abruptly to their meals when Lucifer waves his hand. 

“I thought we talked about the whole messing with minds thing.”

“And I thought you understood that just because I am oddly fond of you and even of your pie-worshipping brother does not mean I find the rest of your kind to be of any worth.” Lucifer opens the book, scanning the text without any of the hitches in concentration or blinking or any of that other little human things. 

Sam leaves him to it, going up to the counter to find something for him, something to tempt Lucifer to try, and something sufficiently sugary for when Gabriel shows up to pretend to be offended like he does every time Lucifer touches Sam with a little bit of his grace. Apparently, it’s some sort of angelic bonding ritual, sharing grace, like making friendship bracelets at a sleepover or swapping stories about clever devil’s traps with other hunters. 

He settles on espresso and a chocolate croissant for himself, assorted donut holes with various dips for Lucifer, and a designer cupcake for Gabriel. It would have been a splurge in the past, but he’s on the Heavenly Gold Card now, which is less of a credit card and more of the cash he needs always manages to show up in his pocket. Which was awkward when they chased a siren to a strip club and his wallet was suddenly filled with far more singles than he ever needed the moment a brunette dancer with gold eyes and wings painted in gold stepped out. 

And the dancer was wearing those hot pink stilettos that Gabriel walks around in when he thinks Sam isn’t paying enough attention to him.

Yeah, they’re proving that magic always comes with a price. Not that he usually minds the price. The price has so often been normalcy and people they care about: it really starts with Mom, but for him it will always feel like it begins with Jess. He never knew Mom, so her loss is always nebulous for him. The road is all he’s ever known, he never craved a home the way Dean did, and yet somehow he’s the one who sleeps in the same bed every night and Dean lives motel room to motel room. 

Sam’s best guess is that it has to do with the difference between Cas, a warrior of the garrison, and Gabriel, for whom Heaven is the home he had and lost. Cas wants to see more, wants to explore a world he’s protected from afar, while Gabriel wants to play house since he’s been alone for so long. 

Sam doesn’t mind playing house, even if he usually does the dishes because Gabriel ignores them until Sam gives in and Lucifer just smashes them and buys new ones. Lucifer enjoys dropping plates off the cliffs. He won’t drop them off the balcony because he might miss a few shards in his precious gardens. It doesn’t matter how long Gabriel lived here before, but after three months of Lucifer’s presence, they are very much his gardens.

“I planted the original one, that’s why.”

“We’ve talked about this.”

“And I have told you it is not that simple. It does not matter that I accept Gabriel’s claim on you, it does not matter that I can make Nick work as a vessel and I am not using you. As it is in Heaven, so must it be on Earth. You were born to be my other half.” Lucifer closes his eyes, reaching up to take comfort from Oriens. “I would have to actively block your mind, Sam, and you are loud.”

“Speaking of Gabriel,” Sam remembers, “I prayed to him. Why did you show up?”

Lucifer shrugs. “He was taking a nap, so I may have listened to his prayers. Nobody prays to me. It gets boring.”

“Stop doing that.” Gabriel appears next to Sam, Epistola joining Oriens on the back of the booth. 

“Doing what?”

“Playing innocent, for one. You know what you did.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll tell Michael.”

“I’ll tell _Father_.”

Gabriel and Lucifer stare each other down because once someone plays the ‘I’ll tell God’ card, there isn’t much of anywhere to go. Sam snickers. ‘I’ll tell Dad’ was never a threat he and Dean used, because Dad would punish them both for wasting his time. 

“Dad doesn’t even listen anymore,” Epistola argues.

“I always was the favorite,” Oriens says, and Sam stares at the bird. Three months, and that’s the first time he’s heard Oriens speak. Lucifer seems to forget about her most of the time, and Sam only knows her name because Gabriel said it a month and a half back. 

Epistola bumps up against Oriens while everyone, Lucifer includes, looks at her in shock. 

Gabriel’s the first one to break the silence. “Yeah, I guess you always were, Lucy. The Morningstar, the angel who burned the very brightest.”

Lucifer raises an eyebrow, ruffling his hand through his hair like he’s been watching too many of Gabriel’s pornos and staring the both of them down in an entirely too suggestive way. “Still do.”

“Okay,” Sam says, because he knows from experience that Gabriel and Lucifer will get into a seduction-off, which is ridiculously confusing since no matter who ‘wins’, Gabriel goes to bed with Sam and Lucifer goes to bed alone and everyone’s okay with that. Lucifer doesn’t really like people, after all, he just likes attention. 

“I like you and Gabriel, Sam, and I tolerate Robert Singer and Castiel and even Dean.”

“Eavesdropping, Lucy.”

“Thank you, now can we get back to figuring out what’s killing people so one of you can go smite it and I can be home in time for dinner?” Sam stabs his finger on the open book in front of Lucifer. 

“Lucy, go smite. Unless it’s a Leviathan, you’ll be fine and you’re better at tracking darkness than I ever was.”

“Oh, send the Devil to find the evildoer,” Lucifer replies, rolling his eyes. “What could possibly be next? Darkness calls to darkness?”

“We could call Michael,” Gabriel offers. 

“Lucifer, find this. Lucifer, smite that. One would think you were the elder,” Lucifer gripes, but he and Oriens disappear with the rest of his donut holes. 

As usual, nobody notices.

Except Gabriel. He wanted the donut holes.

Gabriel takes Sam’s hand across the table and squeezes it in a surprisingly human gesture. “Call your brother and tell him Lucy went to go smite. I left him and Cassie a surprise in their hotel room, so they’ll be busy for a while.”

“Is it a puppy?”

“It’s a puppy.”

Sam grins and squeezes Gabriel’s hand right back. “Machaera’s going to go crazy, dealing with a puppy and Septimana.”

“It’s a cute puppy?”

“Well, I suppose that makes it all better. Finish your cupcake, angel, and let’s go home.”

“ _Archangel_.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more fluffy chapter from Dean to round it out, and then I'll be finished here. Sort of ran out of plot, but I guess that's what happens when I get so excited that I don't plan my plot out all the way before I start.


	20. Fallen Angel

 

Dean loves to drive.

He never had any problem with long days in the car, but there’s really something special when he’s behind the wheel. He loves to drive alone but for Machaera. He loves to drive with Sammy sitting in the passenger seat, book on his lap, and he loves to drive with Cas singing snippets of hymns to the tune of AC/DC. 

Most of all, he loves the freedom of the open road, the freedom to stop where he wants and to take wrong turns and see the roadside attractions the country has to offer. He’s seen so many things, some cool and some that they drove for ages to see that turned out to be pretty lame. It isn’t always pretty, and it isn’t always fun and games and above average pie, but that’s life and he always has Machaera. 

He loves driving in the autumn, the colors along the road and just enough of a chill in the air to remind him he’s alive. He loves apple cider and cinnamon donuts, he loves the crunch of fallen leaves under Machaera’s paws, and he loves the ever-changing world around them. Cas spent this autumn trying pumpkin spice everything and insisting that they carve pumpkins and visit a cider mill. They hunt mostly in the Midwest, chasing living scarecrows and witches and even a lake monster that leads to Gabriel sending them out on a boat with harpoons. 

They drag Sam with them to a haunted house and a haunted corn maze and a haunted hayride. There’s a new one every place they go, from haunted mazes in school gymnasiums staffed by pock-marked teens to genuinely freaky haunted houses done by pros who play more on primal fears than the actual ghosts and monsters. Dean confiscates Cas’ angel blade after the first time he nearly stabs a Jason-wannabe over a jump scare and he denies holding Cas’ hand through the corn maze. Dean critiques all of the ghosts for accuracy until Gabriel starts spooking up the hauntings for them with a little help from Lucifer on accurate portrayals of Hell. Dean starts carrying lots of salt and holy water after that. 

They have an actual Thanksgiving dinner at Bobby’s, the archangels filling every surface with roast turkey and bowls of stuffing and cranberries and pie of every kind. There’s Bobby and Rufus’ favorite liquors and Dean and Sam’s favorite microbrews from around the country and Dean spends it tempting Cas to try various things. Gabriel and Lucifer share a bottle of something that shimmers gold that even Cas is surprised to see, something with an unpronounceable name in Enochian. Rufus seems to take dining with the Devil in stride, but then again Rufus takes everything in stride and Lucifer brought him a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label from the original run. It’s crowded, with the seven of them and their rather sizable daemons, but he can’t complain when Machaera’s taking up the most room. 

Dean loves the winter days when they close the windows and turn up the heat, the Legos rattling in the vents and windows fogging up when he and Cas are hunting alone and pull over to the side of the road. He loves the vortex snow makes as it swirls in the night and he loves the sparkle of short winter days on a world of snow and ice. Septimana starts taking on larger forms to stay warm and the backseat is a crowded mass of fur. It’s hot chocolate and soup and lazy kisses in the early evenings when it’s already dark. It’s teaching Cas to wear flannel and finding funny hats everywhere they go and Sammy sends an archangel to put a fireplace in every motel room so Cas can roast marshmallows. 

It’s Christmas by the side of the frozen lake with three trees decorated outside because Lucifer won’t let them be cut down for a ‘pagan holiday that doesn’t even coincide with Yeshua’s birth and you both know that, even I know that and I was in the Cage’. They celebrate the New Year with grace-powered fireworks and more alcohol than was probably wise, with Bobby fussing about over-decorated presents and Gabriel doubling the number of glittery bows after that. Gabriel gives everyone candy and lacy underwear, Lucifer gives them all- including Gabriel- guidebooks to basic Enochian demon wards, and Cas collected random souvenirs from their travels to give them all. Sam and Dean and Bobby exchange their usual nontraditional mix of beer and porn and car products, just wrapped in gaudy paper and glittery bows courtesy of everyone’s self-declared favorite archangel.

And when Valentine’s Day rolls around, Cas greets Dean with all the hallmarks of an almost normal Valentine’s Day. They ham it up with a cheesy date and increasingly ridiculous cards and make out in the Impala to commemorate their first weird but happy year. Sam, much to nobody’s surprise, is bombarded by naked Cupids bearing boxes of jalapeno-spiked chocolate, all of them mildly confused as to why they were diverted from their route. Sam refuses to play along, letting Dean and Cas have their fun and taking Lucifer with him to finish the hunt, which apparently ended with Gabriel getting so overly dramatic that _Lucifer_ had to lecture him about appropriate behavior.

Dean even loves spring, driving through torrential rains and mud and cool days pretending to be warm because they just came out of the winter. Cas gets a cold for the first time in eternity, drippy nose and everything, and Gabriel and Lucifer start popping in to the Impala with bowls of soup and increasingly exotic medicines and unwanted advice yet neither of them straight up heal him. Machaera starts wearing her hunting harness all the time with saddlebags attached for Septimana to ride in, curled up in misery. Spring isn’t their best season, but without an Apocalypse threatening, it slows down, lets them appreciate days trapped inside by storms andnapping in the Impala with the drumming of the rain and quiet weeks traveling when even the monsters take things slowly. 

Most of all, Dean loves driving in the summer. He loves summer days with the windows down, singing along at the top of his lungs as they drive along lonely routes to the middle of nowhere. He loves summer nights when it isn’t quite dark and it isn’t quite cool and they lay blankets down and he holds Cas’ hand and stares at the stars. They spend days at Bobby’s where Dean fixes cars and gets covered in grease and Machaera rolls in a kiddie pool complaining about the heat. They spend days by the lakeside while Gabriel and Lucifer spar and Sam and Dean swim and Cas tries to like the water and prefers to watch them from the beach instead. 

There’s werewolves and demons and vampire nests. Dean learns about the absolute delight that is watching demons kowtow to Lucifer before he smites and Gabriel replaces everyone’s swimsuits with Speedos that are two sizes too small. Bobby gets grumpy about being called for research because ‘those damn angels eat my food and they’ve read more books that I ever could, you idjits’ but he and Rufus start hunting together again, training a hunter named Garth to man the phone lines instead. 

Gabriel and Lucifer convince Michael to restore Cas’ grace but not to demand his return to Heaven, and the visits of other angels become a strangely regular thing. He and Cas still live on the road, motel room to motel room, but they stay at nicer places now and with Cas’ grace restored, he’s starting to look at the places they pass through and insist on stopping to look at homes. 

The Fourth of July, always one of Dean’s favorites after he and Sammy would set off fireworks with or without Dad, turns into one-half hunter gathering, one-half angel family reunion. It turns into a week-long event at a different party house of Gabriel’s with picnic tables overflowing with food, every item labeled either with _For Boring Humans_ or _Not For Humans- no, Lucy, you can’t edit the sign_. An angel from Cas’ former garrison beefs up all the explosives on the fireworks without telling anyone and then proceeds to ‘borrow’ the archangels’ private supply of whatever they won’t let anyone else drunk and prove that amazing powers of… power are really funny when angels are roaring drunk. 

When the weather cools and autumn rolls around again, it finds Dean equally confused as Cas while shopping for furniture, both of their equally unhelpful brothers popping in and out. Gabriel wants to convince Cas on furniture that looks like it belongs in a porno and Sam keeps using Lucifer to chase Gabriel down and convince Cas that no, that’s not a good idea. 

They have a house now, white picket fence and all. Wards, both the ones Dean and Sam learned from Dad and complicated ones in Enochian, were painted in archangel blood on the inside of the walls before they put up drywall. There’s salt lines built into the doors and the windowsills, every precaution they could think about. It also has a massive arsenal. 

They still hunt, him and Sam together as well as just with Cas and Septimana by his and Machaera’s side. That’ll never change. It’s just easier to have Cas fly them wherever they need to go these days and they sleep in the same bed every night. 

They have to learn how to make a bed and what to do with fitted sheets and they learn to cook more than burgers. Machaera stops prowling when they watch TV, satisfied in their own safety. Thanksgiving is held at their place this year and it takes them a solid week to finish cleaning up without losing all their plates to Gabriel snapping the mess away. 

They still take road trips, driving cross-country in the Impala with no destination and no hurry. Sometimes, they still drive to a case for the sheer pleasure of it instead of having Cas fly them straight there. It’s their life, just with a home for the first time since Mom died. 

It’s something he never thought he’d get.

Dean used to love driving alone, but now he’s never happier than when there’s an angel in the passenger seat and the open road in front of him.

“Turn up the music, Cas, and let’s roll.”

“Where are we going?”

Dean slings his free arm around Cas’ shoulders. “I have absolutely no idea.”

Dean loves to drive, and he even loves to drive alone, but now alone includes an angel in the passenger seat and he’s never looking back.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thank you for reading so far with me in the fic in which I found out that there are a lot more good Meat Loaf songs than the ones I knew. As always, I can be found figuring out what I'm going to work on next at nagapdragon.tumblr.com. I really hope you enjoyed this nearly as much as I loved writing it!


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